Resource Database

Oil Sands Mining and Reclamation Cause Massive Loss of Peatland and Stored Carbon

We quantified the wholesale transformation of the boreal landscape by open-pit oil sands mining in Alberta, Canada to evaluate its effect on carbon storage and sequestration. Contrary to claims made in the media, peatland destroyed by open-pit mining will not be restored. Current plans dictate its replacement with upland forest and tailings storage lakes, amounting to the destruction of over 29,500 ha of peatland habitat. Landscape changes caused by currently approved mines will release between 11.4 and 47.3 million metric tons of stored carbon and will reduce carbon sequestration potential by 5,734–7,241 metric tons C/y. These losses have not previously been quantified, and should be included with the already high estimates of carbon emissions from oil sands mining and bitumen upgrading. A fair evaluation of the costs and benefits of oil sands mining requires a rigorous assessment of impacts on natural capital and ecosystem services.

Pioneers and Perches—Promising Restoration Methods for Degraded Renosterveld Habitats?

The study reports on two restoration experiments, designed to re-introduce key plant functional types back into this critically endangered habitat. The first experiment concentrated on a common pioneer species in renosterveld vegetation, Otholobium hirtum. Although in vitro experiments showed a significantly elevated germination response after scarification, in vivo experiments failed to produce establishment in an abandoned field. The second restoration experiment focused on bush clumps, a sub-type of renosterveld vegetation that is characterized by broad-leaved shrubs with fleshy bird-dispersed diaspores. The experiments revealed that restoration using early-succession species and natural dispersal vectors appear not to produce demonstrable benefits, despite their promising potential and pre-testing of effectiveness. Before launching large-scale restoration programs in abandoned fields of renosterveld, preliminary studies in-field are strongly recommended.

Plant Species Richness and Ecosystem Multifunctionality in Global Drylands

Experiments suggest that biodiversity enhances the ability of ecosystems to maintain multiple functions, such as carbon storage, productivity, and the buildup of nutrient pools (multifunctionality). However, the relationship between biodiversity and multifunctionality has never been assessed globally in natural ecosystems. We report here on a global empirical study relating plant species richness and abiotic factors to multifunctionality in drylands, which collectively cover 41% of Earth’s land surface and support over 38% of the human population. Multifunctionality was positively and significantly related to species richness. The best-fitting models accounted for over 55% of the variation in multifunctionality and always included species richness as a predictor variable. Our results suggest that the preservation of plant biodiversity is crucial to buffer negative effects of climate change and desertification in drylands.

Plant Traits – A Tool for Restoration?

Plant trait models determined what proportion of this explanatory power can be attributed to plant traits. The two model types addressed the following specific questions: (1) how much of the variability in field responses (changes in cover) of plants to restoration management treatments is explained by plant traits; and (2) how well do plant traits explain the variability of field responses (changes in cover) following restoration management treatments compared to models relating field responses to species identity? Strong explanatory power of plant trait models supports the feasibility of using plant traits instead of species taxonomic identity as a common language to characterize plant field responses (changes in cover) to restoration treatments.

Australian Approaches for Managing ‘Country’ Using Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Knowledge

management (NCRM) in northern and central Australia. We primarily draw on the papers within this special issue of Ecological Management & Restoration, which originated largely from the Indigenous land management symposium at the 2010 Ecological Society of Australia conference. Many of the papers and therefore this article discuss practical experiences that offer insight for enhanced on-ground cross-cultural NCRM and can inform broader thinking and theoretical critiques. A wider literature is also drawn upon to substantiate the points and broaden the scope of the synthesis.

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function

How is the biodiversity within an ecosystem related to the ecosystem’s function? Quantifying and understanding this relationship— the biodiversity ecosystem function (BEF) —is important because socio-economic development is almost always accompanied by the loss of natural habitat and species. Short-term economic gains may thus trump longer-term benefits for human society, creating vulnerabilities that could be avoided or corrected with enough knowledge about the role of biodiversity.

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: A Multilayered Relationship

The relationship between biodiversity and the rapidly expanding research and policy field of ecosystem services is confused and is damaging efforts to create coherent policy. Using the widely accepted Convention on Biological Diversity definition of biodiversity and work for the UK National Ecosystem Assessment we show that biodiversity has key roles at all levels of the ecosystem service hierarchy: as a regulator of underpinning ecosystem processes, as a final ecosystem service and as a good that is subject to valuation, whether economic or otherwise. Ecosystem science and practice has not yet absorbed the lessons of this complex relationship, which suggests an urgent need to develop the interdisciplinary science of ecosystem management bringing together ecologists, conservation biologists, resource economists and others.

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Complementary Approaches for Ecosystem Management?

The concept of ecosystem services introduced a new view on the relationship between biodiversity and human well being. But are both concepts, biodiversity and ecosystem services, mutually beneficial? We will try to unravel part of this much debated question in three steps. A division of ecosystem management into these three zones confirms the complementarity of biodiversity and ecosystem services for policy and management strategies. The concept of this triple division can help to facilitate the discussion of a joint achievement of the goals for biodiversity and ecosystem services in the field.

Comparing the effect of naturally restored forest and grassland on carbon sequestration and its vertical distribution in the Chinese Loess Plateau

Vegetation restoration has been conducted in the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP) since the 1950s, and large areas of farmland have been converted to forest and grassland, which largely results in Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) change. However, there has been little comparative research on SOC sequestration and distribution between secondary forest and restored grassland. Therefore, the authors selected typical secondary forest (SF-1 and SF-2) and restored grassland (RG-1 and RG-2) sites and determined the SOC storage.

Deforestation Strongly Affects Soil Seed Banks in Eucalypt Forests: Generalisations in Functional Traits and Implications for Restoration

We examined the potential role of the soil seed bank in restoration of an open eucalypt forest community following land-use change involving clearing of native eucalypt forest for grazing and subsequent abandonment, and for establishment of Pinus radiata plantation. We used plant functional traits responsive to disturbance and other traits associated with the capacity to re-colonise and form persistent seed banks as a means of assessing the effects of land-use change on soil seed banks.

Developing Multimetric Indices for Monitoring Ecological Restoration Progress in Salt Marshes

Effective tools for monitoring the status of ecological restoration projects are critical for the management of restoration programs. Such tools must integrate disparate data comprised of multiple variables that describe restoration status, including the condition of environmental stressors, landscape connectivity, ecosystem resilience, and ecological structure and function, while communicating these concepts effectively to a wide range of stakeholders. In this paper we describe the process of constructing multimetric indices (MMIs) for monitoring restoration status for restoration projects currently underway on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia. During this process, an initial suite of measurements is filtered for response and sensitivity to ecosystem stressors, eliminating measurements that provide little information and reducing future monitoring efforts. The retained measurements are rescaled into comparable domain metrics and assembled into MMIs. The MMIs are presented in terms of established restoration theories, including restoration trajectory and restoration endpoint targets.

Ecosystem Restoration with Teeth: What Role for Predators?

Recent advances highlight the potential for predators to restore ecosystems and confer resilience against globally threatening processes, including climate change and biological invasions. However, releasing the ecological benefits of predators entails significant challenges. Here, we discuss the economic, environmental and social considerations affecting predator- driven ecological restoration programmes, and suggest approaches for reducing the undesirable impacts of predators.

Eelgrass Restoration by Seed Maintains Genetic Diversity: Case Study from a Coastal Bay System

Genetic diversity is positively associated with plant fitness, stability, and the provision of ecosystem services. Preserving genetic diversity is therefore considered an important component of ecosystem restoration as well as a measure of its success. We examined the genetic diversity of restored Zostera marina meadows in a coastal bay system along the USA mid-Atlantic coast using microsatellite markers to compare donor and recipient meadows. We hypothesize that the high genetic diversity in seagrasses restored using seeds rather than adult plants confers a greater level of ecosystem resilience to the restored meadows.

Effects of Seed Traits on the Success of Direct Seeding for Restoring Southern Thailand’s Lowland Evergreen Forest Ecosystem

The success of direct seeding, as a low-cost approach to forest restoration, varies with tree species and seed characteristics. A system to predict which tree species are likely to be suitable for direct seeding would therefore be useful for improving forest restoration projects. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the effects of seed traits on the success of direct seeding to restore tropical forest in southern Thailand. These conditions successfully predicted the success or failure of direct seeding for 15 out of 19 species tested. Eight tree species are recommended as suitable for restoring lowland evergreen forest ecosystems in southern Thailand, by direct seeding.

Biophysical Principles for Designing Resilient Networks of Marine Protected Areas to Integrate Fisheries, Biodiversity and Climate Change Objectives in the Coral Triangle

Biophysical principles are presented in this report to help nearshore marine protected area networks achieve fisheries sustainability, biodiversity conservation and ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change. These principles can be considered rules-of-thumb to help guide decision making. In the past, such principles and associated rules-of-thumb have focused on only one or two of these objectives – not all three simultaneously.

Ecological Restoration for Protected Areas: Principles, Guidelines and Best Practice

IUCN, SER and partners published Ecological Restoration for Protected Areas: Principles, Guidelines and Best Practices, which provides guidance for terrestrial, marine, and freshwater protected area managers at both system and site levels on the restoration of natural and associated values of protected areas.

Relevance for the Short Term Action Plan for Ecosystem Restoration:
This comprehensive guidance can assist with identifying appropriate restoration measures (C1), developing restoration plans (C3), developing tasks, schedules and budgets (C4), and project implementation (C5). It is also relevant regarding activities in Group D, monitoring.

Green, Clean, and Dollar Smart: Ecosystem Restoration in Cities and Countryside

This guidebook offers cities, counties, states, and stakeholders some discussion, examples, and a summary of tools and policy recommendations that may stimulate further interest in expanding, integrating, and refining the greening of urban infrastructure using an ecosystem services framework.

Profitable Farms and Woodlands: A Practical Guide in Agroforestry for Landowners, Farmers and Ranchers

This is a practical handbook on agroforestry, in an easy to read format written for underserved and limited resource farmers and woodland owners living in the Southeastern U.S. The handbook is designed to assist farmers and woodland owners establish, manage and market agroforestry projects that are diverse, integrated, profitable, healthy and sustainable. A team of agroforestry experts collaborated to produce this manual. Rigorous and extensive reviews were made for each chapter to ensure the information applies to the targeted audiences and their needs.

Strategies for Nearshore Protection and Restoration in Puget Sound

This report provides: a strategic framework, a landscape assessment for large-scale protection and restoration of nearshore ecosystems, and a set of recommendations based on that assessment. These analyses were developed as part of the Puget Sound Nearshore Ecosystem Restoration Project (Nearshore Project). While these assessments are intended to organize and broadly guide the scope and focus of capital investment for protection and restoration of ecosystem processes in the Puget Sound nearshore, we anticipate that the effectiveness of restoration is dependent on the effectiveness of protections provided by regulation, education, and property acquisition. We anticipate there are multiple benefits for strong coordination between regulatory and capital projects work. These strategies reflect the collaboration of the local, state, tribal, federal, and non-profit partners engaged in the Nearshore Project.

Stream Habitat Restoration Guidelines

The purpose of the Stream Habitat Restoration Guidelines (SHRG) is to promote process based natural stream restoration, rehabilitating aquatic and riparian ecosystems. These guidelines advance a watershed scale assessment of the stream system, establishing goals, objectives and design for restoring optimum sustainable native biodiversity, using principles of landscape ecology and integrated aquatic ecosystem restoration. While a number of specific watershed assessment, characterization, project design and construction approaches are presented in this volume, these guidelines do not offer a “cookbook” approach that provides every step and equation along the way. Rather, the intent is to provide readers with a comprehensive list of factors and criteria to consider, which are essential to make informed decisions when planning and designing stream restoration and rehabilitation work. Readers are strongly cautioned not to pluck and apply individual techniques from these guidelines without first conducting the necessary watershed and reach based assessments and analysis.

Catalysing ocean finance: Volume 1 – Transforming markets to restore and protect the global ocean

This publication – Catalysing Ocean Finance – demonstrates that, far from being an intractable problem, sustainable ocean management
could become a successful legacy of today’s generation of decision-makers. It shows how the challenges facing the ocean
stem from widely understood market and policy failures – failures which can be addressed through the application of appropriate
mixes of market and policy instruments.

Catalysing ocean finance: Volume 2-Methodologies and case studies

This publication – Catalysing Ocean Finance – demonstrates that,
far from being an intractable problem, sustainable ocean management could become a successful legacy of today’s generation of
decision-makers. It shows how the challenges facing the ocean stem from widely understood market and policy failures – failures
which can be addressed through the application of appropriate mixes of market and policy instruments.

Special Feature on Vegetation Restoration (2010)

The present volume contains twelve papers presented at the 7th European Conference on Ecological Restoration held from 23 to 27 August 2010 in Avignon, France.

Species, Functional Groups, and Thresholds in Ecological Resilience

On the basis of our results, we believe an ecosystem with a full complement of species can sustain considerable species losses without affecting the distribution of functions within and across aggregations, although ecological resilience is reduced. We propose that the mechanisms responsible for shaping discontinuous distributions of body mass and the nonrandom distribution of functions may also shape species losses such that local extinctions will be nonrandom with respect to the retention and distribution of functions and that the distribution of function within and across aggregations will be conserved despite extinctions.

Structural and functional loss in restored wetland systems

Wetlands are among the most productive and economically valuable ecosystems in the world. However, because of human activities, over half of the wetland ecosystems existing in North America, Europe, Australia, and China in the early 20th century have been lost. Ecological restoration to recover critical ecosystem services has been widely attempted, but the degree of actual recovery of ecosystem functioning and structure from these efforts remains uncertain. Our results from a meta-analysis of 621 wetland sites from throughout the world show that even a century after restoration efforts, biological structure (driven mostly by plant assemblages), and biogeochemical functioning (driven primarily by the storage of carbon in wetland soils), remained on average 26% and 23% lower, respectively, than in reference sites.

The Influence of Time on the Soil Seed Bank and Vegetation across a Landscape-Scale Wetland Restoration Project

Wicken Fen National Nature Reserve (NNR) in Cambridgeshire, U.K. is a wetland of international importance isolated in a landscape dominated by arable farming. The prospect of species extinctions within the NNR led to the creation of the Wicken Fen Vision, an ambitious project that will eventually expand the reserve boundary by the purchase and restoration of c.50 km2 of arable land. We sampled three fields from each of three distinct age-categories of restoration land (5, 15, and 60 years post-arable), and three fields within the adjacent, undrained NNR, to determine (1) differences in seed bank composition across age-categories, (2) relationships between restoration age, the seed bank and standing vegetation, and (3) changes in species traits across age-categories.

The political economy of reforestation and forest restoration in Asia-Pacific: Critical issues for REDD+

This article examines the political economy of reforestation and forest restoration programs in Asia–Pacific and highlights governance challenges these pose.

The Potential of Soil Amendments for Restoring Severely Disturbed Grasslands

Habitat destruction and land use change are among the anthropogenic influences affecting many ecosystems. After environmental degradation, restoration and reclamation efforts can be hampered by poor physio-chemical soil characteristics and reduced soil community complexity. To enhance degraded system recovery, soil manipulations may be necessary to alleviate habitat destruction. This review will (1) discuss grassland restoration in terms of ecosystem-level processes, and (2) analyze the efficacy of novel and easily applicable amendments (i.e. compost, biochar, and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi) to facilitate grassland recovery in severely degraded habitats. We suggest that restoration practitioners emphasize soil ecological knowledge and microbial processes in tandem with native plants when restoring damaged ecosystems. This review is intended to guide practitioners in the promotion of grassland ecosystem sustainability.

The Ridgefield Multiple Ecosystem Services Experiment: Can Restoration of Former Agricultural Land Achieve Multiple Outcomes?

The ability of restoration approaches to provide valued ecosystem services needs to be assessed. The emerging carbon market provides an incentive to afforest agricultural landscapes and could potentially achieve multiple outcomes. However, planting monocultures for carbon sequestration may preclude effective delivery of other ecosystem services. Here, we describe the rationale behind the Ridgefield Multiple Ecosystem Services Experiment, a long-term investigation into trade-offs that might prevent the simultaneous provision of high levels of multiple services in the agricultural landscape of south-western Australia. Ridgefield tests the possibility of restoring and managing agricultural landscapes for multiple ecosystem services, providing a much needed experimental investigation of trade-offs among ecosystem functions.

The Robustness and Restoration of a Network of Ecological Networks

Understanding species’ interactions and the robustness of interaction networks to species loss is essential to understand the effects of species’ declines and extinctions. In most studies, different types of networks (such as food webs, parasitoid webs, seed dispersal networks, and pollination networks) have been studied separately. We sampled such multiple networks simultaneously in an agroecosystem. We show that the networks varied in their robustness; networks including pollinators appeared to be particularly fragile. We show that, overall, networks did not strongly covary in their robustness, which suggests that ecological restoration (for example, through agri-environment schemes) benefitting one functional group will not inevitably benefit others. Some individual plant species were disproportionately well linked to many other species. This type of information can be used in restoration management, because it identifies the plant taxa that can potentially lead to disproportionate gains in biodiversity.