ABSTRACT
Living shoreline techniques are very diverse and practices can vary by region, salinity and tidal regime, and degrees of natural and artificial components. This chapter discusses restoration, living shorelines, ecological engineering, and novel ecosystems. Living shorelines should be implemented with the restoration goal at its foundation, given the pressure of alternative needs such as erosion control. Permitting is necessary to implement living shoreline projects, design and construction are necessary to build them, and physical and biological monitoring are necessary to document whether living shoreline projects are stable and provide the target ecological functions. Nature is constantly changing in our human-dominated world, and it is up to us to be adaptive and plan for the future. By laying the framework of nature-based approaches and building upon past successes and failures, authors can hope to maintain natural features in our shorelines while faced with the formidable climate change scenarios that are down the road.
