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
Quantitative restoration targets for fish and wildlife habitats and populations in the Lower Green Bay and Fox River AOC
TL;DR: In this article, the authors outline a quantitative process for setting targets to remove two fish and wildlife-related beneficial use impairments (BUIs) in the Lower Green Bay and Fox River Area of Concern (LGB&FR AOC).
Journal ArticleDOI
Challenging the practice of biodiversity offsets: ecological restoration success evaluation of a large-scale railway project
TL;DR: In this article, the evaluation of ecological compensation via biodiversity offsets and technical constructions with a secondary compensation function for a new railway in Austria is presented, where the authors conducted a vegetation inventory on reference areas and all types of measures that created new habitats.
Degradation and invasibility of subtropical grasslands in Southern Brazil
TL;DR: In this article, the extent of non-native species invasion and possible interactions with processes of land-use changes are largely unknown and priorities for managing nonnative species need to be set.
Journal ArticleDOI
Nucleation increases understory species and functional diversity in early tropical forest restoration
TL;DR: It is argued that the incorporation of (several) more sophisticated nucleation techniques is beneficial for restoration of tropical forests as it can overcome seed and site limitation, and foster the recovery of structural, functional, and species diversity.
Selection and performance of ecosystem attributes for assessment of restoration success in biodiversity offset models
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a solution to solve the problem of the problem: this article ] of "uniformity" and "uncertainty" of the solution.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity
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
TL;DR: It is argued that human actions are dismantling the Earth’s ecosystems, eliminating genes, species and biological traits at an alarming rate, and the question of how such loss of biological diversity will alter the functioning of ecosystems and their ability to provide society with the goods and services needed to prosper is asked.
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Indicators for Monitoring Biodiversity: A Hierarchical Approach
TL;DR: The three primay attributes of biodiversity recognized by Jerry Franklin are expanded into a nested hierarcby that incorporates ele- ments of each attribute at four levels of organization: re- gional landscape, community-ecosystem, population- species, andgenetic.
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.
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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.