This guide is for practitioners, managers and community members to provide both guidance in decision-making for establishing shellfish reef restoration projects and examples of different approaches undertaken by experienced practitioners in a variety of geographic, environmental and social settings.

The guide both updates and expands on the original Practitioners Guide (Brumbaugh et al.), capitalising on the improvements in knowledge around the ecological function of bivalves in their coastal environments as well as on the depth and breadth of experience that now exists globally.

The restoration approach is aligned to the Society for Ecological Restoration’s International standards for the practice of ecological restoration and was developed by a global team of writers and editors.

The Shellfish Reef Habitats report describes the historic extent and current knowledge of Australian shellfish reefs and identifies knowledge gaps and future research priorities with the aim of supporting restoration efforts.

This report should be cited as:

Gillies CL, Creighton C and McLeod IM (eds) (2015) Shellfish reef habitats: a synopsis to underpin the repair and conservation of Australia’s environmentally, socially and economically important bays and estuaries. Report to the National Environmental Science Programme, Marine Biodiversity Hub. Centre for Tropical Water and Aquatic Ecosystem Research (TropWATER) Publication, James Cook University, Townsville, 68 pp.

The paper‘Australian shellfish ecosystems: Past distribution, current status and future direction’  reviews the status of marine shellfish ecosystems formed primarily by bivalves in Australia, including: identifying ecosystem-forming species, assessing their historical and current extent, causes for decline and past and present management.

NOAA and the Nature Conservancy’s ‘A Practitioners Guide to the Design and Monitoring of Shellfish Restoration Projects’ has been written to assist restoration practitioners design and monitoring shellfish restoration projects that restore not only the populations of target shellfish species – primarily clams, oysters, scallops – but also the ‘ecosystem services’ associated with healthy populations of these organisms.



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