Mangroves are among the most threatened ecosystems on Earth, driving growing interest in restoring them. Ecosystem design, building a mangrove from scratch on newly created intertidal substrate, is an emerging approach, yet success is usually judged on planted-tree survival rather than recovery of the associated fauna. Faunal assemblages cannot be “planted”; they arrive through slow, uneven recruitment conditional on biotic and abiotic factors. No previous study has tracked both macrobenthos and avifauna at once, from before construction through to vegetation establishment. AquaForest, an eco-engineered mangrove built by elevating a former tidal flat with dredged sediment in the Guayas River Estuary, Ecuador, offers a rare opportunity to fill this gap. We present the first biodiversity assessment of such a system to follow two faunal groups across this transition, comparing the colonizing community with a pre-construction baseline and four reference mangroves. Within 13 months AquaForest shifted from a bare tidal flat to a young planted mangrove. The bird community is developing toward the references in family and guild structure, but not yet in species, while still adding to rather than replacing the baseline. The macrobenthos tracks its physical setting rather than the vegetation. Settling the trajectory will require continued multi-taxa monitoring.
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