The Colony Island Network Design and Implementation (CINDI) project emerged within a complex restoration funding and decision-making landscape along the Texas coast, where multiple agencies and initiatives intersect to support habitat restoration and resilience. Particularly, the Texas Coastal Resiliency Master Plan (TCRMP) is a stakeholder-driven framework that guides the state’s coastal restoration and protection efforts by identifying priority projects and strategies to enhance the resilience of natural and human communities along the Texas coast. The CINDI project supports these statewide efforts by developing a co-produced colony island restoration prioritization tool designed to inform and align with the goals of the TCRMP. The CINDI project adopted a co-production framework to ensure that research, modeling, and management decisions evolve collaboratively and address the needs of various restoration efforts.

The team’s organizational structure emphasizes the unique role of the Advisory Group as defined in the CINDI Team Charter—serving as both a bridge to end users and a feedback mechanism to align project outputs with real-world decision contexts. The team’s Project Concept Model serves as a roadmap for co-production, guiding both process assessment and the development of evaluation tools. Engagement mechanisms supporting this collaborative process include shared digital workspaces, a website and public list-serv, regular meetings, the concept model itself, publication guidance, a communication plan, and a co-production evaluation plan.

Preliminary results from the co-production assessment reveal strong satisfaction among participants regarding transparency and inclusivity. Further, any challenges are reported to help the team adjust and adapt the engagement process. Ongoing work and future work are expanding the reach of engagement.

Lessons learned from this process contribute to advancing best practices for integrating science, policy, and management through co-production in large, interdisciplinary coastal projects.