Abstract: “Living shorelines” are a relatively recent form of shoreline protection that seek to facilitate coastal processes and replicate natural ecosystem functioning through the use of native vegetation and oysters. Compared to hard shoreline protection (e.g., bulkheads, seawalls), living shorelines preserve aquatic-terrestrial connectivity and provide foraging habitat for a variety of marine taxa. Living shorelines have been demonstrated to effectively reduce shoreline erosion through the wave attenuation and sediment deposition, but investigations on the secondary ecological benefits provided remain sparse. There is limited knowledge on the importance of living shorelines as faunal habitat, and even less on how bird and mammal communities use these created habitats. We monitored 10 living shoreline sites and paired unrestored reference areas with trail cameras to investigate how they influenced bird and mammal diversity, frequency, and habitat use. Cameras collected data two weeks a month from May 2022 to Jan 2023, 24 hours per day, taking one photo per minute throughout their deployments. A total of 2.5 million photographs were taken over the study period, 8,135 of which contained animal detections. Photos were examined for all bird and mammal activity, identifying animals to the species level. While we found no significant difference in species diversity, birds and mammals visited sites more frequently and had a higher frequency of foraging events along living shorelines compared to reference areas. These results provide novel data to the field of nature-based coastal protection and suggest that living shorelines may provide enhanced wildlife habitat quality.
