**Abstract:** Nature-based features provide a welcome class of adaptations to promote ecological resilience in the face of climate change. Along coastlines, living shorelines are among the preferred adaptation strategies to both reduce erosion and provide ecological functions. As an alternative to shoreline armoring, living shorelines are viewed favorably among coastal managers, wetlands boards, and some private property owners, but they have yet to undergo a thorough examination of how their levels of ecosystem functions compare to their closest natural counterpart: fringing marshes. Here, we provide a synthesis of results from a multi-year, large-spatial-scale study in which we compared numerous ecological metrics measured in thirteen pairs of living shorelines and natural fringing marshes throughout coastal Virginia, USA. Overall, we found that living shorelines were functionally equivalent to natural marshes in nearly all measured aspects, except for a lag in sediment composition. These data support the prioritization of living shorelines as a coastal adaptation strategy. **Preprint:** [bioRxiv.org][1] **Published Paper:** [PeerJ.org][2] ---------- ## AUTHOR'S NOTE ## Please note that the data and figures contained on this page differ slightly from those published in the [PeerJ][3] articles as of the time of this writing (2022-01-13). The editorial staff at PeerJ are aware of the issue and have reached out to the academic editor on the paper. We, the authors, as well as the staff, feel that the error is extremely minor and does not in any way alter the interpretation of the results. The following is an excerpt from the email to the editorial staff: > My co-authors and I need to report that an error was discovered in the data used for our analysis of article #11815 (https://peerj.com/articles/11815/), manuscript #59907. The data represented one out of the 18 metrics that we used to compare living shorelines to natural fringing marshes. The data were provided by co-author A. Guthrie, and were a site-level summary of juvenile fish abundance. Upon inspection of her code for a different project, she noticed that she had inadvertently summarized the incorrect column of her data set. She provided me with the corrected data, and I re-ran the analyses from our paper. The good news is that though the absolute values changed, the trends and interpretation did not. The only place in the manuscript where the text requires an update is in the Results: Age section, and that is only very minor changes to the reported values for the beta-coefficients, credible intervals, and LOOIC values. The old and updated text are provided in the “CorrectionText.odt” attached file. Figures 2, 3, and 4, and Table 2 also require an update as a result of the changed data. In Figures 2 and 3, the only part of the figures that change are the juvenile fish abundance sections. Figure 4 represents the combined score of all 18 metrics, and so the values are just slightly changed relative to the original. Table two includes the updated juvenile fish abundance overall z-score change from 0.06 to 0.09. The supplemental information also requires an update to incorporate the changes to the junvenile fish data. The full conversation is available in the files of this repository. The required textual changes are also documented. Please contact [Robert Isdell][4] with any questions. [1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.06.438648v1 [2]: https://peerj.com/articles/11815/ [3]: https://peerj.com/articles/11815/ [4]: mailto:risdell@vims.edu