Journal ArticleDOI
Evaluating Ecological Restoration Success: A Review of the Literature
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TLDR
This article conducted a literature review to determine trends in evaluations of restoration projects and identify key knowledge gaps that need to be addressed, and 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.Abstract:
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.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Integrating ecosystem functions into restoration ecology—recent advances and future directions
Johannes Kollmann,Sebastian T. Meyer,Rolf Bateman,Timo Conradi,Timo Conradi,Martin M. Gossner,Milton de S. Mendonça,Geraldo Wilson Fernandes,Geraldo Wilson Fernandes,Julia-Maria Hermann,Christiane Koch,Sandra Cristina Müller,Yumi Oki,Gerhard E. Overbeck,Gustavo Brant Paterno,Milena Fermina Rosenfield,Tiago Shizen Pacheco Toma,Wolfgang W. Weisser +17 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reviewed the inclusion of ecosystem functions in restoration and potential relations to habitats and species by extracting 224 publications from the literature (2004-2013) and found that 14% analyzed only ecosystem functions, 44% considered both biotic composition and functions, 42% exclusively studied the biotic component, mostly vascular plants, more rarely invertebrates or vertebrates, and least often microbes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Monitoring the structure of forest restoration plantations with a drone-lidar system
Danilo Roberti Alves de Almeida,Eben N. Broadbent,Angelica M. Almeyda Zambrano,Benjamin E. Wilkinson,Manuel Eduardo Ferreira,Robin L. Chazdon,Paula Meli,Eric Bastos Gorgens,Carlos A. Silva,Scott C. Stark,Ruben Valbuena,Daniel de Almeida Papa,Pedro H. S. Brancalion +12 more
TL;DR: UAV-borne lidar systems showed enormous potential for monitoring relatively broad-scale forest restoration projects, providing an important tool to aid decision making and accountability in forest landscape restoration.
Journal ArticleDOI
Degradation and Recovery in Changing Forest Landscapes: A Multiscale Conceptual Framework
Jaboury Ghazoul,Robin L. Chazdon +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the concept of recovery debt is proposed to measure the cumulative lost benefits incurred, relative to a target state during phases of degradation and recovery, and the degradation is defined as a state where the capacity for regeneration is greatly reduced or lost, core interactions and feedbacks are broken, and human intervention is required to initiate a trajectory of recovery.
Journal ArticleDOI
Which landscape size best predicts the influence of forest cover on restoration success? A global meta‐analysis on the scale of effect
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors conducted a global meta-analysis for biodiversity (mammals, birds, invertebrates, herpetofauna and plants) and measures of vegetation structure (cover, density, height, biomass and litter).
Journal ArticleDOI
Measuring the success of reforestation for restoring biodiversity and ecosystem functioning
TL;DR: Assessment of how dung beetle species diversity, community composition, functional diversity and ecological functions vary along a restoration chronosequence and compare restored areas with reference (rainforest) and degraded (pasture) systems provides empirical evidence on the potential of tropical forest restoration to mitigate biodiversity losses.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
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Bradley J. Cardinale,J. Emmett Duffy,Andrew Gonzalez,David U. Hooper,Charles Perrings,Patrick Venail,Anita Narwani,Georgina M. Mace,David Tilman,David A. Wardle,Ann P. Kinzig,Gretchen C. Daily,Michel Loreau,James B. Grace,Anne Larigauderie,Diane S. Srivastava,Shahid Naeem +16 more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Enhancement of biodiversity and ecosystem services by ecological restoration: a meta-analysis.
TL;DR: A meta-analysis of 89 restoration assessments in a wide range of ecosystem types across the globe indicates that ecological restoration increased provision of biodiversity and ecosystem services by 44 and 25%, respectively, however, values of both remained lower in restored versus intact reference ecosystems.
Journal ArticleDOI
Towards a Conceptual Framework for Restoration Ecology
Richard J. Hobbs,David A. Norton +1 more
TL;DR: This work stresses the importance of developing restoration methodologies that are applicable at the landscape scale, beyond nonquantitative generalities about size and connectivity, so that urgent large-scale restoration can be planned and implemented effectively.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ecological Theory and Community Restoration Ecology
TL;DR: Practical restoration efforts should rely heavily on what is known from theoretical and empirical research on how communities develop and are structured over time, and are identified specific areas that are in critical need of further research to advance the science of restoration ecology.