Data from: Life-cycle informed restoration: engineering settlement substrate material characteristics and structural complexity for reef formation.The manuscript that has been based on these data is published in Journal of Applied EcologyThese datafiles are part of a study that defines and experimentally test the idea that life cycle-informed approaches that focus on overcoming multiple bottlenecks throughout the target species’ lifetime, instead of focusing on a single life stage, can improve restoration yields. The three experiments were conducted in the Netherlands and in Florida USA.The datasets contain data obtained from three manipulative field experiments on mussel and oyster biomass, length and individuals from the Netherlands and Florida USA.