The concepts around the emerging field of nature-inclusive designs are still open to some interpretation. At NiD4OCEAN we have adopted the terminology defined by the Horizon Europe ULTFARMS project (https://ultfarms.eu/), detailed in the table below.
Term | Description | Reference |
|---|---|---|
Nature-inclusive design | Any intentional measure that creates optimized artificial habitat with the aim of enhancing selected biodiversity assets. Here, ‘intentional measure’ is an active and deliberate manipulation; ‘creates’ implies something unnatural being constructed; ‘optimized’ denotes adaptations or enhancements to an infrastructure without being its primary objective; ‘artificial habitat’ refers to the built structure or area; ‘selected biodiversity assets’ are selection of life forms, ecological functions and/or processes. | Cornacchia, et al. (2025) |
Restorative Nature-inclusive Design | A type of nature-inclusive design aimed at promoting or regaining locally natural ecosystem assets at a certain location (such as facilitating the re-establishment of a species in a natural suitable habitat within its historical range of occurrence). The design measures are intended to have long-lasting effects, ensuring the persistence of these ecosystem assets over time. | Cornacchia, et al. (2025) |
Creative Nature-inclusive design | A type of nature-inclusive design that seeks to enhance biodiversity “beyond nature” (such as beyond the location where a habitat or species was known to occur), focusing on artificially created ecosystem assets, and which comes in two main forms. A first subtype, i.e. creative NiD optimising infrastructure, aims at ecologically optimising the design of the necessary infrastructure, like scour protection of an offshore wind turbine, to locally boost selected natural values. While this subtype artificially boosts selected natural values, it may be expected that it will not meaningfully harm natural values prevailing nearby. The second subtype, i.e. creative NiD as addon structures, also aims at boosting selected natural values but it does so by additional artificializing natural habitat that would not have been affected by the infrastructure needed for the activity at sea. In this case, boosting the natural values coincides with an additional direct loss of natural habitat. Examples of this subtype are concrete tubes placed in between turbines to create cod habitat. | Cornacchia, et al. (2025) |
Nature-based solutions | Nature-based solutions address societal challenge through the protection, sustainable management and restoration of ecosystems, benefiting both biodiversity and human well-being. | IUCN (2022) |
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are inspired and supported by nature, they are cost-effective, simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help build resilience; such solutions bring more, and more diverse, natura and natural features and processes into cities, landscapes and seascapes, through locally adapted, resource-efficient and systemic interventions. NBS must benefit biodiversity and support the delivery of a range of ecosystem services. | European Research Executive Agency (2023) | |
Mitigation measures | Measures taken to reduce, minimize or nullify the negative impact of a human activity on the ecosystem. In the case of aquaculture, this can include reducing the risk of introducing diseases, invasive species, the risk of over-exploitation of the area, or mitigating anchoring effects. | Cornacchia, et al. (2025) |
