12 steps to marine rewilding

Before you dive into creating a plan for marine rewilding, it’s essential that you spend some time building up a picture of the local marine environment – not only collecting data but holding important conversations with those who live and work there. This will help you gauge what sort of rewilding interventions would be best suited to the area, will ensure that the rewilding benefits a wide variety of stakeholders, and that you're able to monitor the changes the project brings about (step 10).

Some of this information can be gathered from existing sources — local knowledge, public datasets, historical records and conversations with people who know the area well. Other data is more technical and you'd do best to engage a marine ecologist (see step 3). We recommend that you try to gather information on the following themes, which will serve as a ‘baseline’ for the area — i.e. a picture of the state of the area pre-wilding, that you can compare against as the project develops (step 10, recording change).

Habitats 
Which habitats exist in the area today? For example seagrass meadows, kelp forests, oyster beds, sand banks, rocky reefs... Are they in good shape or are they struggling? 

How connected to each other are they? Historically, were they part of one large mosaic of habitats? What used to be there? This is important because many marine species depend on connections between habitats at different stages of their lives, with fish, larvae and nutrients moving through the seascape via tides and currents.

Fishers, divers, marine users and coastal residents often have deep insights into how habitats and species have changed over time. See if you can access historic fish catch records, old nautical charts, local archives, academic studies and oral histories from fishers and others in the community.

Species
Which species are present in the area — and are they protected or of conservation interest? You may be able to get this information through local records, academic studies of the area, local citizen science projects, conservation projects or if you’re in England, from your regional Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority (IFCA).

Ecological processes
A marine biologist will be able to assess which ecological processes — such as predator-prey interactions or nutrient-cycling thanks to species such as algae or seagrass — are taking place and, equally, which are missing. This will help you understand what is going on within the site at a deeper level and what might need remedying.

Sediment and wave exposure 
Gather information on sediment type (e.g. sand, mud or rock) and levels of wave exposure. Both these factors determine whether certain habitats or species could survive in the area and so will help you gauge which restoration techniques could be suitable.

Marine activities
What are the primary marine activities taking place at present? For example, commercial or recreational fishing, offshore energy such as wind turbines and their associated infrastructure (cables, buildings etc). Is there a harbour or port in the area? Which recreational activities are happening — e.g. surfing, diving or other water sports? What sort of activities could this site support in the future if it were in rewilding, such as sustainable fishing or eco-tourism?

Protected areas 
Are there any legally protected ‘marine designations’ in place already? These could include Marine Protected Areas (MPA), Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMA), Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs), Special Protection Areas (SPAs), Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), Ramsar sites or Special Areas and Conservation (SACs). You can find this information on Defra’s MAGIC interactive maps site (England only), on the Joint Nature Conservation Committee's (JNCC) marine protected areas mapper, NatureScot’s MPA data, the Natural Resources Wales (NRW) DataMapWales MPA layer, or from your local IFCA or council. In the event of a designation, seeking the protected area’s condition assessment (where they have been conducted) can be a great way to obtain data on the area.

Finding out whether any water quality assessments have been carried out in the area, can provide detail on the current state of the water and whether the site might be suitable for some form of water quality designation.

Online resources and public datasets
Specialists are vital in understanding site potential, but there are also resources and datasets that offer a good starting point, including:

For spatial data — including seabed habitat maps, bathymetry data (i.e. depth measurements and underwater terrain mapping), designated sites or fishing activity — we recommend checking:

• the UK Atlas of Seabed Habitats from the JNCC 
• the MMO's master data register (England only)
• your region's Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority (England only)
• the Wales Public Register
• NatureScot Data Services
• local record centres such as a local university
• academic studies (you could start with Google Scholar if this is a new field for you) 
• Seasearch, a UK-wide platform collating data from divers and snorkellers 
• resources from community-led rewilders Seawilding
   
  The following are also useful at this stage in your planning:
   
• a guide to Identifying sites suitable for marine habitat restoration or creation from the Marine Management Organisation (MMO)
• Natural England and the Environment Agency's Marine and Coastal Habitat Restoration Principles, produced by for anyone looking to undertake restoration in the estuarine, coastal, and marine environments
• Marine and coastal enhancement projects within Scottish inshore waters guidance from NatureScot
• Restoring marine and coastal habitats in Wales: identifying spatial opportunities and benefits from Natural Resources Wales
   

You may be engaging with rewilding because your community has already identified a specific threat to the ecosystem, or you may simply sense that the marine environment is increasingly under pressure. Before springing into action with a plan for rewilding, take some time to pinpoint these pressures, so that your project can tackle reducing or ending these before any active restoration begins (for example restoring seagrass, where appropriate). As exciting as they are, restoration methods without pressure removal are destined to fail.

Pressures to address could include: water pollution, unsustainable fishing, coastal erosion, plastic pollution, noise pollution, boat anchoring, nutrient runoff, unsustainable tourism, coastal development, offshore development or the disturbance of species by people.

Working out how best to start marine rewilding involves seeking out expertise and knowledge on your local marine environment.

Marine ecologists can help with many stages of your project, including understanding a site's potential (steps 1 and 2), designing your project, implementing the plan, and monitoring (step 2). They can also advise on policy, legislation and governance, which has to be considered with any project in the marine environment.

You can hire an accredited ecologist via the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, or connecting with your local university’s marine biology, oceanography or environmental science departments is also a useful way to access expertise.

It’s important to include local experts in conversation and information-gathering, too, such as fishers, community groups, marine users etc. Local people connected to the sea often know its patterns and history deeply. Including their voices and values in planning and design builds trust, long-term support, and more meaningful outcomes for both nature and people.

You could also talk to others already rewilding in the area. Check our Rewilding Network map to find out which projects are already active across Britain — and our Local Rewilding Network map to see if there’s a network in your area that you could join. Connecting with existing projects will ensure you're not duplicating effort and could make your work even more impactful — for rewilding is most effective when done at scale!

Other local environmental groups, including Wildlife Trusts, are also buzzing with enthusiasts and are often willing to help nature-boosting projects like yours. 

A marine rewilding initiative can't get very far without involving the local community. When people are informed and involved, they're much more likely to understand and support the need for proposals to remove pressure on the marine environment — such as a new byelaw or voluntary schemes like no-anchor zones or pollution-reducing measures. Without that early buy-in, projects can face opposition, misunderstanding and even active resistance.

Local communities are a valuable source of knowledge as well. Combining this with scientific data in step 1 can greatly improve your project’s design and outcomes.

An involved local community can also be of great help for monitoring and data collection (step 10). People love to get involved in citizen science and when collected in a standardised way, this can provide invaluable data for your project.

Connectivity and scale is vital for the marine environment to flourish, so try to vision your rewilding project at a ‘seascape scale’. How does it relate to nearby habitats, local rewilding and conservation projects and the wider seascape in general?

In practice, this means using the data gathered in step 1 to consider how fish, larvae, and nutrients flow between areas and how your site fits into that bigger picture. It also means avoiding restoring isolated patches that wildlife couldn’t reach, or which are too small for it to thrive. Working with the natural layout of an area, rather than imposing an artificial design, is much more likely to support the return of dynamic, interconnected systems. So take time to map how different habitats are arranged, where reefs form and how features like depth or wave exposure shape conditions.

Your plan should take into account existing activities and development in the area, as well as allowing sufficient time for the local community to be meaningfully involved (step 4).

Finally, it isn't possible — or advisable — to plan every step in the rewilding journey. Rewilding focuses on intervening in the most suitable way to kickstart ecosystem processes so that nature can take care of itself, rather than being driven by specific targets and end-goals.

As outlined in step 2, it's essential to prioritise the reduction or removal of damaging activities before you make any plans to carry out ‘active’ marine restoration (step 7). For example, there’s little point in restoring oyster beds if damaging fishing practices or more destructive forms of anchoring continue in the area.

Once you've found out if designations are already in place to reduce these pressures (outlined in step 1), consider what else could usefully be introduced to help further. Examples include voluntary no-anchor zones, codes of conduct, shoreline management plans, voluntary marine conservation areas, voluntary marine nature recovery strategies — and even legally binding measures such as byelaws imposed with the support of your governing fishing body (easier to achieve in England through your local IFCA), or securing designated bathing water status. While not every type of protection will be applicable to your site, most are actionable at the local level. Take inspiration from the difference that community rewilding projects have made by campaigning for protections like these (see box below). 

It’s tempting to dive straight into activities such as seagrass seeding or native oyster restoration at this stage, particularly as taking positive, visible action can bring a sense of purpose for a project and the surrounding community. However, such interventions may not be necessary — and if they aren’t, it’s important to let nature do the work instead. Given time, many habitats and ecosystems can bounce back once pressures are removed, thanks to the amazing level of connectivity and resilience within our ocean.

If, however, the baseline surveys collected in step 1 demonstrate that habitats are too degraded for natural processes to recover without help, active restoration may well be needed to boost ‘natural regeneration’. This is definitely an area where you should enlist expert advice, as mistakes such as planting in the wrong sediment or introducing harmful species could do more damage than good.

To carry out marine rewilding, you will likely need to obtain certain permits or licenses, or to undertake assessments. These could include, but aren’t limited to: marine licenses; landowner consent, foreshore and seabed leases; impact assessments (if the potential site is within an MPA or could potentially impact one nearby); fisheries and aquaculture assessments; waste and water quality impact assessments.

Marine ecologists, restoration practitioners and local authorities can help identify what’s needed and provide guidance on applying for permissions. However, it’s worth noting that advice from license-granting government bodies such as the MMO, Nature Scot or the Welsh Government could come with a price tag.

Once your marine rewilding project is up and running, we strongly encourage you to join the Rewilding Network, which supports 1,000+ members to actively rewild and share best practice. Membership — which is free — gives you access to a community of rewilders on a similar journey to yourself, as well as to live webinars on practical issues, online resources, Rewilding Britain expertise, policy insights and exclusive funding opportunities.

By coming together with others in the same boat, you’ll not only benefit from useful information and support, but sharing your own experiences and expertise will help build the rewilding movement across Britain.

While rewilding projects shouldn't have a fixed outcome in mind, the overall aim should be the recovery of natural processes — and all the associated ecological and socio-economic benefits that come from this. So it’s critical that anyone rewilding monitors what’s changing at their site. This not only enables your project to understand what’s happening — with the potential to change tack, if necessary — but to share results and learnings with the wider rewilding movement.

Make sure your monitoring programme is carried out at regular intervals using the same methods and metrics each time, right from the initial baseline survey done in step 1. Marine monitoring methods to measure ecological change could include: shoreline surveys, boat surveys, snorkel or dive surveys, baited remote underwater video deployment, underwater photography/video ID, eDNA or acoustic monitoring.

Some of the more complex monitoring methods should be undertaken by marine ecologists, but citizen science can also play a useful role. Not only is it low-cost, it’s an ideal way to get the community involved. Even if you enlist local volunteers, apply the same principle of collecting standardised data throughout the project’s lifetime. This Community-led Marine Biodiversity Monitoring Handbook from NatureScot and others makes useful reading.

You should also ensure that your monitoring tracks socio-economic change — as in, what is the rewilding project's impact on things like people's health and wellbeing, education, community participation, employment and enterprise? 

When you’re putting time and effort into a rewilding project that you’re passionate about, it’s natural to want to see a visible and immediate impact and — if you can’t — to dive straight into trying new things. But rewilding needs time and space. Your task as a rewilder is to make a limited number of well-chosen interventions that rebuild the relationships between species, habitats and processes, restoring nature’s ability to heal itself. After getting protection in place for the site (step 6) or carrying out active restoration, it should now be over to nature to adjust and start its own recovery for a time. Of course, do keep recording the changes, so that you can see what might need to happen next.

Britain has lost so much of its knowledge of how thriving seascapes could and should be. And while the concept of marine rewilding has been talked about for some time, it’s only recently that projects have been putting it into practice around our coasts. So the more marine rewilding projects record and share the changes they see, the better understanding we will have of just what is possible.

If you are able to share your experiences and wisdom, including what is and isn’t working, this will give crucial intel to projects just starting out. We’d love to welcome you into the Rewilding Network (see step 9) to share your story and benefit from others’ experiences as you embark on your unique marine rewilding journey.