Engineering emergent trait-based mimics to restore coastal ecosystems shaped by habitat-forming species

Coastal ecosystems shaped by habitat-forming species provide vital ecosystem services but are declining worldwide. Their restoration is failure-prone because ecosystem stability hinges on self-facilitation generated by ‘emergent traits’. Such traits emerge when habitat formers aggregate, causing self-facilitation to only work beyond certain minimum patch size and density thresholds. My recent work demonstrates how biodegradable structures that temporarily mimic emergent traits can overcome such establishment thresholds. These mimics, however, were crude and untailored to the target species and their environment. Here, I will test a new framework that combines methods from ecology, industrial design, and engineering to design tailormade mimics.