Prioritizing restoration of coastal wetlands on Molokaʻi Storymap

Molokaʻi is the fifth most populated of the eight main islands that make up the Hawaiian archipelago. Located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the island faces serious impacts from sea-level rise and has already experienced severe runoff and sedimentation from upland forest degradation. Coastal wetlands on the island have been degraded due to sedimentation, human alteration, and invasive species. Loʻipūnāwai (spring-fed irrigated agricultural pondfields), which were historically used to grow kalo (taro, a root vegetable), have been lost across the entire landscape except for a few scattered locations.  

Coastal wetlands are fundamentally important to Native Hawaiians—their function is inextricably intertwined with sociocultural values, a prime example of the Hawaiian socioecological system in which humans are perceived as part of and not separate from nature (Berkes and Folke, 1998; Winter and others, 2018; Gon and others, 2021). Given the need for coastal wetland restoration in Hawaiʻi and the rare opportunity to carry out restoration at a landscape scale on Molokaʻi, the  Molokaʻi Wetland Partnership  studied 11 coastal wetlands on the island. Our main objectives were to develop a protocol to prioritize coastal wetlands for restoration and to use the new protocol to rank each of the sites. We then used this prioritization to create a blueprint for wetland restoration across the island.