Summary 1. Increasingly, river managers are turning from hard engineering solutions to ecologically based restoration activities in order to improve degraded waterways. River restoration projects aim to maintain or increase ecosystem goods and services while protecting downstream and coastal ecosystems. There is growing interest in applying river restoration techniques to solve environmental problems, yet little agreement exists on what constitutes a successful river restoration effort. 2. We propose five criteria for measuring success, with emphasis on an ecological perspective. First, the design of an ecological river restoration project should be based on a specified guiding image of a more dynamic, healthy river that could exist at the site. Secondly, the river’s ecological condition must be measurably improved. Thirdly, the river system must be more self-sustaining and resilient to external perturbations so that only minimal follow-up maintenance is needed. Fourthly, during the construction phase, no lasting harm should be inflicted on the ecosystem. Fifthly, both pre- and postassessment must be completed and data made publicly available. 3. Determining if these five criteria have been met for a particular project requires development of an assessment protocol. We suggest standards of evaluation for each of the five criteria and provide examples of suitable indicators. 4. Synthesis and applications . Billions of dollars are currently spent restoring streams and rivers, yet to date there are no agreed upon standards for what constitutes ecologically beneficial stream and river restoration. We propose five criteria that must be met for a river restoration project to be considered ecologically successful. It is critical that the broad restoration community, including funding agencies, practitioners and citizen restoration groups, adopt criteria for defining and assessing ecological success in restoration. Standards are needed because progress in the science and practice of river restoration has been hampered by the lack of agreed upon criteria for judging ecological success. Without well-accepted criteria that are ultimately supported by funding and implementing agencies, there is little incentive for practitioners to assess and report restoration outcomes. Improving methods and weighing the ecological benefits of various restoration approaches require organized national-level reporting systems.

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Standards for ecologically successful river restoration

Evaluating the quality of medical care.

Tree Rings And Climate

Despite the increasing importance of functional traits for the study of plant ecology, we do not know how variation in a given trait changes across ecological scales, which prevents us from assessing potential scale-dependent aspects of trait variation. To address this deficiency, we partitioned the variance in two key functional traits (leaf mass area and leaf dry matter content) across six nested ecological scales (site, plot, species, tree, strata and leaf) in lowland tropical rainforests. In both traits, the plot level shows virtually no variance despite high species turnover among plots and the size of withinspecies variation (leaf + strata + tree) is comparable with that of species level variation. The lack of variance at the plot level brings substantial support to the idea that traitbased environmental filtering plays a central role in plant community assembly. These results and the finding that the amount of within-species variation is comparable with interspecific variation support a shift of focus from species-based to trait-based ecology.

How do traits vary across ecological scales? A case for trait‐based ecology

Assessing the success of ecological restoration projects is critical to justify the use of restoration in natural resource management and to improve best practice. Although there are extensive discussions surrounding the characteristics that define and measure successful restoration, monitoring or evaluation of projects in practice is widely thought to have lagged behind. We conducted a literature review to determine trends in evaluations of restoration projects and identify key knowledge gaps that need to be addressed. We searched the Web of Knowledge plus two additional restoration journals not found in the database for empirical papers that assessed restoration projects post-implementation. We quantified the extent that key attributes of success, including ecological (vegetation structure, species diversity and abundance, and ecosystem functioning) and socioeconomic, were addressed by these papers along with trends in publication and restoration characteristics. Encouragingly, we found the number of empirical evaluations has grown substantially in recent years. The increased age of restoration projects and number of papers that assessed ecological functions since previous reviews of the literature is also a positive development. Research is still heavily skewed toward United States and Australia, however, and identifying an appropriate reference site needs further investigation. Of particular concern is the dearth of papers identified in the literature search that included any measure of socioeconomic attributes. Focusing future empirical research on quantifying ecosystem services and other socioeconomic outcomes is essential for understanding the full benefits and costs of ecological restoration and to support its use in natural resource management.

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Evaluating Ecological Restoration Success: A Review of the Literature

Little is known of how bacterial diversity in soils varies with elevation. One previous study found a decline with elevation, whereas another found no trend. We chose Mount Fuji of Japan as a geologically and topographically simple mountain system. Samples were taken at elevational intervals, between the base of the mountain at 1,000 m and its summit at 3,700 m. Polymerase chain reaction-amplified soil DNA for the bacterial 16S gene targeting V1-V3 region was pyrosequenced using the 454 Roche machine, and taxonomically classified with reference to a bioinformatic database. There was a significant "peak" in total bacterial diversity at around 2,500 m above the tree line with a decline towards the highest elevations around 3,700 m near the summit. Individual bacterial phyla show distinct trends-increase, decrease, or a mid-elevational "bulge" in diversity. Bacterial diversity does not parallel woody plant or herbaceous plant diversity. We suggest that beyond the tree and vegetation line, the more extreme temperature fluctuations, stronger UV, lack of nutrients, and more frequent disturbance of the loose substrate of these slopes allows less competition and greater bacterial species diversity due to "lottery" recruitment. However, at the highest elevations, the physiological challenges are so extreme that fewer bacterial species are capable of surviving.

A hump-backed trend in bacterial diversity with elevation on Mount Fuji, Japan.

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Effects of understory dwarf bamboo on soil water and the growth of overstory trees in a dense secondary Betula ermanii forest, northern Japan: Understory dwarf bamboo and overstory trees

. Microhabitats for seedling establishment and gap regeneration in subalpine forests of northern Japan were studied for two conifers, Abies sachalinensis and Picea glehnii. The abundance of understorey dwarf bamboo (Sasa spp.) was different for the four plots examined. Two types of micro-habitats were recognized for the two conifers: ground and elevated woody substrates (fallen logs and buttresses). Picea regenerated mostly on elevated sites, while Abies regenerated on both ground and elevated sites. The densities of Picea were independent of those of Sasa, but Abies densities decreased with increasing abundance of Sasa because Sasa reduced regeneration on the ground. Density of Abies on elevated sites was higher than that of Picea, irrespective of Sasa and of the density of adult trees. There was no significant difference in growth in sapling trunk height between the two conifers, but Picea grew more slowly under the canopy than Abies and was aggregated into gaps. Thus, in forests with less Sasa, the recruitment capacity of Abies was greater than that of Picea. The long life span of Picea compensated for its low density on elevated sites. Examination of a dynamic system model showed that Picea was excluded by Abies in forests without Sasa because regeneration on the ground is more advantageous than on elevated sites, but the two conifers could coexist in forests with Sasa because of the increased relative success of regeneration on elevated sites by Picea saplings.

Regeneration and coexistence of two subalpine conifer species in relation to dwarf bamboo in the understorey

Plastic Response of Crown Architecture to Crowding in Understorey Trees of Two Co-dominating Conifers

Tree-ring width chronologies were developed for Abies veitchii, Betula ermanii and Betula platyphylla var. japonica in their altitudinal ecotone (approximately 1600 m a.s.l.) on Mount Norikura, central Japan, to determine what climatic conditions affect the growth of tree species in the upper and lower distribution limits of an altitudinal ecotone. This altitude was the lower distribution limit for A. veitchii and B. ermanii in the subalpine zone, and was the upper distribution limit for B. platyphylla var. japonica in the montane zone on Mount Norikura. Tree-ring widths of the two Betula species and A. veitchii were positively correlated with the August precipitation of the current and previous years, respectively. Precipitation in August (the hottest month) was reduced compared with other months during summer. Tree-ring width of B. platyphylla var. japonica showed no correlation with temperatures in any month in its upper distribution limit. In contrast, tree-ring widths of B. ermanii and A. veitchii were negatively correlated with the August temperatures of the current and previous years, respectively, at the lower distribution limit of these species. Therefore, the two Betula species and A. veitchii responded to climatic conditions of the current and previous years, respectively. The present study also suggests that a water deficit in August reduces growth of these three species in this altitudinal ecotone, irrespective of the upper or lower distribution limits, and that a high August temperature is more detrimental to the growth of A. veitchii and B. ermanii in their lower distribution limits. Thus, the three species with different altitudinal distributions examined in the present study responded differently to climatic conditions in this altitudinal ecotone on Mount Norikura.

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Effects of climate on the radial growth of tree species in the upper and lower distribution limits of an altitudinal ecotone on Mount Norikura, central Japan

Koichi Takahashi

Papers

A hump-backed trend in bacterial diversity with elevation on Mount Fuji, Japan.

Effects of understory dwarf bamboo on soil water and the growth of overstory trees in a dense secondary Betula ermanii forest, northern Japan: Understory dwarf bamboo and overstory trees

Regeneration and coexistence of two subalpine conifer species in relation to dwarf bamboo in the understorey

Plastic Response of Crown Architecture to Crowding in Understorey Trees of Two Co-dominating Conifers

Effects of climate on the radial growth of tree species in the upper and lower distribution limits of an altitudinal ecotone on Mount Norikura, central Japan