Hillman Marsh Restoration and Climate Change Adaptation

Project Overview

The Healthy Headwaters Lab has been hired by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) to assist inform the actions and implementation of monitoring associated with the restoration of Hillman Marsh Conservation Area. With our new project, in effect from 2024 to 2025, our contribution is set out to be the development and implementation of a value-driven conceptual framework to assess ecosystem services and gains anticipated from the Hillman Marsh restoration plan. Among our objectives is to identify linkages between ecosystem service gains and ecological wetland values and functions, summarized by a broad set of performance indicators. We hope that this set of performance indicators and the conceptual framework will provide a rigorous methodology for future monitoring plans and evaluation of wetland ecosystem service gains in Hillman Marsh, and a plausible suggestion for other coastal/littoral wetlands across the Great Lakes.

Objectives

The Healthy Headwaters Lab has been hired by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) to assist in informing the actions and implementation of monitoring associated with the restoration of the Hillman Marsh Conservation Area, in close collaboration with Essex Region Conservation Authority. With our new project, in effect from 2024 to 2025, our contribution is set out to be the development and implementation of a value-driven conceptual framework to assess ecosystem services and gains anticipated from the Hillman Marsh restoration plan. Among our objectives is to identify linkages between ecosystem service gains and ecological wetland values and functions, summarized by a broad set of performance indicators. We hope that this set of performance indicators and the conceptual framework will provide a rigorous methodology for future monitoring plans and evaluation of wetland ecosystem service gains in Hillman Marsh, and a plausible suggestion for other coastal/littoral wetlands across the Great Lakes.

Our project is consisting of two teams from UWaterloo and UWindsor. The team from UWaterloo run monitoring events in the summer and fall 2024 to identify ecosystem services across the wetland. Furthermore, we hope that through deliberations with Interest-Knowledge-Rights holders (IKRs) across the area we can also inform our Framework to identify values, ecosystem services, gains as well as associated indicators.