Prioritizing Wetland Restoration Sites: A Review and Application to a Large-Scale Coastal Restoration Program

Wetland restoration has emerged as an important tool for counteracting and restoring lost ecological services resulting from urban and agricultural development. Over the last 20 years, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) modeling has also become a powerful mechanism for prioritizing potential wetland restoration sites across a variety of geographic scales. Although numerous studies have created GIS-based models for a variety of uses, no one has comprehensively analyzed and compared models to determine best practices and inform future site selection efforts. We performed a comprehensive literature review of GIS-based wetland prioritization models. We found no congruency between stated objectives, specific variables and metrics, and respective weighting and scoring systems. We then performed a case study, applying these findings to explore potential improvements to the spatial decision support system (SDSS) used by the Mississippi Coastal Improvement Program (MsCIP; USA), a large-scale coastal restoration project aimed at improving the resiliency and reducing flood risk after significant damage from Hurricane Katrina (2005). This case study draws on several state-of-the-art practices in the literature to retroactively study potential improvements in the SDSS’s flexibility and accuracy in identifying potential wetland restoration sites. Our findings suggest improvements for wetland restoration prioritization models (including consistent variable use and ground-truthing) that could better direct future federal initiatives, as well as a wide range of domestic and international wetland restoration programs.