Setting Realistic Goals for Species and Habitat Restoration in Aquatic Systems: Examples from Great Lakes and Pacific Coast Ecosystems

The restoration of aquatic species and habitats is a widespread management goal, but restoration goals are often unclear or unrealistic and sustainability is difficult to evaluate.  Setting realistic restoration goals in large, complex aquatic systems like the Great Lakes, the Pacific Ocean and their tributaries is a difficult task.  Identification of critical physical and biological processes required for species restoration at ecosystem or landscape scales may be difficult, particularly where ecosystems have been altered by invasive species, loss of biocomplexity, or large-scale habitat alterations.  Alterations to large-scale physical processes due to climate change may further complicate the establishment of relevant restoration goals, which may also be very difficult to establish in systems where genetic or life-history diversity within a species has been lost.  In this symposium, we address the challenges associated with setting and achieving restoration goals in large complex aquatic systems and provide examples from the Laurentian Great Lakes and the Pacific coast of North America.