Uniting for restoration: SER Europe to host key session on collaborating for success at NORA6

The sixth edition of the Native Oyster Restoration Alliance (NORA) conference, co-organized by the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO-CSIC), is set to take place from 24 - 27 November 2025, at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, Murcia, Spain. This year’s event promises to spotlight cross-disciplinary innovation, habitat-specific strategies, and actionable solutions to accelerate the restoration of our marine and coastal ecosystems, under the banner of "Working together for oyster restoration", with a special focus on the Mediterranean. 

The Society for Ecological Restoration Europe (SER-Europe) has been invited to lead a session at the conference, bringing together in discussion representatives from the Native Oyster Restoration Alliance, the European Seagrass Restoration Alliance, and the European Marine Cluster under the Bio-Agora project, as well as practitioners currently working at seascape scale to restore marine habitats.

A Call for Integration and Impact

As the global restoration community moves beyond siloed approaches, this session aims to foster a deeper dialogue around the integration of habitat-specific initiatives within broader restoration frameworks. The conversation will centre on how sharing knowledge, methods, and monitoring tools across ecosystems such as oyster beds and seagrass meadows can amplify impact and scale restoration efforts more effectively. Further to this, we will bring the perspective of marine project clusters and explore the seascape approach, considering entire coastal marine ecosystems and their interactions with humans, thus offering the necessary holistic lens to restoration which complements the work of these specialized alliances.

Why This Matters

Restoration targets outlined in European law and global biodiversity frameworks, including the Nature Restoration Regulation and EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, can only be achieved through a combination of focused, habitat-specific expertise under the umbrella of system-wide coordination. By bringing together such organizations and encouraging the integration of their expertise into future projects, the session exemplifies the type of collaboration needed to ensure restoration efforts are efficient, evidence-based, scalable, and lasting.

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