Deliverable 5.2 - Upscaling Wetland Restoration: Barriers and Best Practice
Deliverable 5.2 aims to establish the availability and quality of best practice resources for wetland restoration activities across Europe.
Objectives:
- highlight the existence of the most useful best practice resources (handbooks or guidelines);
- determine which elements of restoration are adequately addressed by the currently available manuals;
- identify gaps in the best practice resources.
By collaborating with experts across WaterLANDS partner institutions in 12 countries, the report compiles and evaluates best-practice resources for wetland restoration.
- 81 best-practice manuals were identified in an initial search.
- Following screening, 39 of those identified were reviewed by experts.
Results
The most useful best practice resources
- There were nine highly rated manuals that shared commonalities.
- They typically had a clear structure, were visually appealing, linked to other peer-reviewed resources, provided more scientific information in the back material and case studies.
- Most of the top-rated manuals were published recently.
Elements of restoration that were adequately addressed
- Technical aspects of wetland restoration were the main focus of most best practice manuals.
- Project planning was addressed by most of the manuals and the top-rated manuals covered this aspect of restoration in depth.
Gaps in best practice resources and barriers to use
- Stakeholder engagement was not covered by most manuals. The more recently published best practice manuals, and especially more generic ones (not specific to a single wetland type), gave more consideration to this aspect of restoration.
- Co-creation was a particularly weak point in the reviewed manuals. The report highlights the manuals that do address co-creation.
- The manuals were usually regionally oriented and rarely highlighted the importance of looking at the wider surroundings of the project area, the external degradation pressures and the various stakeholders involved.
- Several high quality best practice manuals were identified. However, many of these are not published in English, so there are barriers to their wider use. Translating documents is time consuming and requires expertise.
Although there are some clear gaps in the resources, the more recently published manuals are beginning to fill these already.