Resource Database

The Nature of Urban Soils and Their Role in Ecological Restoration in Cities

This article highlights the varied impacts of cities on soils and their implications for restoration planning and expectations of restoration ‘‘success.’’ Urban soils exist in different historical and formational trajectories than their local nonurbanized counterparts due to direct anthropogenic disturbance and indirect environmental impacts from urbanization. Therefore, urban soils often exhibit altered physical, chemical, and biological characteristics in comparison to local nonurbanized soils. Soils in urban restorations are a medium that can be deliberately manipulated to improve site conditions or in the monitoring of soil conditions as indices of ecosystem status. Including an explicit role for strong manipulations of soils in urban ecosystems changes how we approach baselines, management, and reference conditions in urban ecological restoration. With an understanding of urban soil ecological knowledge, we can guide aspects of urban ecological restoration toward successful outcomes.

The Need and Practice of Monitoring, Evaluating and Adapting Marine Planning and Management—Lessons from the Great Barrier Reef

Over the last 30 years, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (GBRMP) has successfully established a multiple-use spatial management approach that allows both high levels of environmental protection and a wide range of human activities. Drawing on this unique long-term experience in the GBRMP, this article discusses key aspects of effective monitoring and evaluation, and summarises lessons learned from over two decades of adaptive management.

The Restoration of Ecological Interactions: Plant–Pollinator Networks on Ancient and Restored Heathlands

Ecological networks provide a powerful tool for assessing the outcome of restoration programmes. Our results indicate that heathland restoration does not have to occur immediately adjacent to ancient heathland for functional pollinator communities to be established. Moreover, in terms of restoring pollinator interactions, heathland managers need only be concerned with the most common insect species. Our focus on pollination demonstrates how a key ecological service can serve as a yardstick for judging restoration success.

The Role of Nurse Trees in Mitigating Fire Effects on Tropical Dry Forest Restoration: A Case Study

The threat of fire is always a consideration when establishing a forest restoration program. Two wildfires occurred in 2006 and 2007 in an established dry forest restoration project in Puerto Rico. The original goal of the project was to determine differential growth responses of native trees under the nurse tree Leucaena leucocephala versus in open sites. In open sites, sprouting was the most common fire response and mature-forest and evergreen species had greater postfire survival than pioneers and deciduous species. Although nurse trees are typically used to help manage nutrient or light environments in reforestation projects, these trees also appear to provide a secondary benefit of limiting fire damage by reducing fuel load.

The Seed-Bank of a Lakeshore Wetland in Lake Honghu: Implications for Restoration

The abundance and species composition in the seed-bank and extant vegetation were investigated in a lakeshore wetland. Our results indicated that a lakeshore wetland seed-bank with viable seeds and high species richness can be used as a macrophyte pool in degraded wetland restoration. Vegetation produced from such a seed-bank will have species similar to the pre-disturbance assemblage. The large number of viable seeds that we found conserved in deeper layers suggests that the most valuable macrophyte pools are conserved at depth. With disturbance, these seeds could be brought back to the surface, and serve as a reserve in recruiting the extant vegetation. We suggest using the sediment containing rich viable propagules in the actual reconstruction project.

The Working for Water Programme: Evolution of a Payments for Ecosystem Services Mechanism that Addresses both Poverty and Ecosystem Service Delivery in South Africa

A payments for ecosystem services (PES) system came about in South Africa with the establishment of the government-funded Working for Water (WfW) programme that clears mountain catchments and riparian zones of invasive alien plants to restore natural fire regimes, the productive potential of land, biodiversity, and hydrological functioning. The success of the programme is largely attributed to it being mainly funded as a poverty-relief initiative, although water users also contribute through their water fees. Nevertheless, as the hydrological benefits have become apparent, water utilities and municipalities have begun to contract WfW to restore catchments that affect their water supplies. This emerging PES system differs from others in that the service providers are previously unemployed individuals that tender for contracts to restore public or private lands, rather than the landowners themselves. The model has since expanded into other types of ecosystem restoration and these have the potential to merge into a general programme of ecosystem service provision within a broader public works programme.

Threats to Mangroves from Climate Change and Adaptation Options: A Review

Adaptation measures can offset anticipated mangrove losses and improve resistance and resilience to climate change. Coastal planning can adapt to facilitate mangrove migration with sea-level rise. Management of activities within the catchment that affect long-term trends in the mangrove sediment elevation, better management of other stressors on mangroves, rehabilitation of degraded mangrove areas, and increases in systems of strategically designed protected area networks that include mangroves and functionally linked ecosystems through representation, replication and refugia, are additional adaptation options.

Tropical Dry Forests in Venezuela: Assessing Status, Threats and Future Prospects

The main challenge to future dry forest conservation is a paucity of explicit policies for management and use. However, scientifically-based management can support positive dry forest policies in many ways, including identifying locations and protocols for ecological restoration, maintaining seed banks, quantifying baseline conditions, and monitoring genetic diversity and other indicators.

Understory Species Richness during Restoration of Wet Tropical Forest in Costa Rica

An effort to restore wet tropical forest in Costa Rica began in 1993 with plantings of native trees in abandoned pasture land. We compared understory plant species richness in three sites planted with a mix of native tree species with understory species in two monoculture plantations and in two secondary growth (unplanted) areas. Understory species in nearby primary forest remnants are also reported for comparison. We identified 356 understory species, ranging from 46 to 134 understory species per plot. Woody species were predominant (50–80%), as were plant species relying on animals for seed dispersal (60–80%). Our data indicate that substantial progress toward understory species richness can be obtained in the first decade of wet tropical forest restoration.

Waste Not, Want Not: The Need to Utilize Existing Artificial Structures for Habitat Improvement along Urban Rivers

Most river restoration techniques are not feasible within large urban rivers, and so there is a need to develop novel methodologies. Artificial structures such as river walls can function as habitat for plant and invertebrate species in urban rivers, and in some cases can be more diverse than remnant habitat. Along the River Thames through central London, plant species richness was found to be significantly higher on river walls than intertidal foreshore, which represents the only remnant habitat for riparian species. Both this survey and other studies have suggested that the physical and environmental characteristics of river walls are likely to influence their capacity to function as ecological habitat, for example, walls composed of more complex construction materials (brick and boulders) being more diverse than simpler structures (concrete and sheet piling).

Acquiring and Managing a Community-Owned Forest: A Manual for Communities

This handbook provides a guide for communities interested in establishing a community -owned forest. We hope that it will be useful for communities in various stages, whether just beginning to think about a project or re-engaging community residents around land already in community ownership. As the examples in this handbook show, each community forest effort is unique to the local forest and community. Most, however, have several elements in common: outreach and information gathering to engage local residents, partners and decision -makers; an open, inclusive process to determine community priorities and governance structures for the forest; establishing relationships with local, regional and national partners; arranging financing for the purchase; and long-term planning and management of the forest. These steps, outlined in more detail in this handbook, do not necessarily happen in chronological order. Rather, some of this work can take place in parallel depending on the needs of your community and the particular forestland in question.

Cedar River Municipal Watershed Riparian Restoration Strategic Plan

China Ecosystem Services and Poverty Alleviation Situation Analysis and Research Strategy

In 2008 UNEP-WCMC produced a report with a consortium of Chinese and international partners on research needs for reducing poverty through better ecosystem management in China. The China ESPA report identified that China’s great progress in poverty reduction has slowed, as the remaining poor tend to be found in environments of low productivity or high risk of ecosystem degradation, such as mountains, grasslands and deserts. Research needs include better understanding of ecosystem functioning for multiple services, and development of methods to analyse policies and projects for both poverty reduction and supply of ecosystem services.

SPECIAL SECTION: RESTORING RIVERS: A SYNTHESIS OF FINDINGS FROM PROJECT RECORDS AND INTERVIEWS

This Special Section in Restoration Ecology synthesizes lessons learned from river restoration mostly in the United States.

Stream Ecosystem Responses to Spatially Variable Land Cover: An Empirically-based Model for Developing Riparian Restoration Strategies

The restoration of native, forested riparian habitats is a widely accepted method for improving degraded streams. Little is known, however, about how the width, extent and continuity of forested vegetation along stream networks affect stream ecosystems. Using model parameters estimated for the mid-Atlantic Piedmont, we show how the model can be used to guide restoration planning in a case study of a small catchment. The model predicts the quantitative change in biological characteristics of the stream, such as indices of species diversity and species composition, that would occur with the implementation of a hypothetical restoration project.

The Art and Science of Lake Restoration

Lake restoration involves first an understanding in a reductionist (scientific) way of the processes that drive lake ecosystems, but then of the ultimate reasons that create these proximate problems. Ultimate reasons lie in a much wider sphere of human nature and the organisation of society. Lake restoration, in its most trivial form, may be simply a form of gardening to allay the symptoms of problems and create the illusion of a solution. Lake restoration in its most profound form involves an understanding of cultural significance and the workings of human societies and forms an epitome for the solution of much greater, global problems. Only in this form does it become truly creative. Approval must come from both of the faces of Janus.

The Efficiency of Payments for Environmental Services in Tropical Conservation

Here I aim to demystify PES and clarify its scope for application as a tool for tropical conservation. I focus on the supply side of PES (i.e., how to convert PES funding into effective conservation on the ground), which until now has been widely neglected. I reviewed the PES literature for developing countries and combined these findings with observations from my own field studies in Latin America and Asia.

The Integrated Constructed Wetlands (ICW) Concept

The free surface flow Integrated Constructed Wetlands (ICW) concept explicitly combines the objectives of cleansing and managing water flow from farmyards with that of integrating the wetland infrastructure into the landscape and enhancing its biological diversity. This leads to system robustness and sustainability. Hydraulic dissipation, vegetation interception, and evapotranspiration create an additional freeboard at the outlet of each wetland segment and at the point of discharge, thus enhancing hydraulic residence time and cleansing capacity during hydraulic fluxes.

The Pleistocene Re-wilding Gambit

Re-wilding parts of North America with exotic Old-World species is an exciting but controversial conservation proposal hijacked by opinions over appropriate conservation baselines and details of implementation. Debate over its worth has become partisan. Here, I summarize the multifaceted issues surrounding Pleistocene re-wilding and edge debate from hazy conceptual arguments to empirical questions that can plug gaps in knowledge and begin to resolve this divisive conservation issue.

The Return of Ecosystem Goods and Services in Replanted Mangrove Forests: Perspectives from Local Communities in Kenya

This paper assesses how resource users value natural versus planted mangroves and how they perceive plantation initiatives. Semi-structured interviews with 48 resource users from two Kenyan villages show marked mangrove dependence. Respondents identified 24 ecosystem goods, and ranked a variety of food items, traditional medicine, fuel and construction materials as very important resources.

The Use of Large Wood in Stream Restoration: Experiences from 50 projects in Germany and Austria

Large wood has been used successfully in several projects in central Europe, predominantly to increase the general structural complexity using fixed wood structures. Our results recommend the use of less costly soft engineering techniques (non-fixed wood structures), higher amounts of wood, larger wood structures and improved monitoring programmes for future restoration projects comparable with those in this study. We recommend the use of ‘passive restoration’ methods (restoring the process of wood recruitment on large scales) rather than ‘active restoration’ (placement of wood structures on a reach scale), as passive restoration avoids the risk of non-natural amounts or diversity of wood loading developing within streams. Local, active placement of wood structures must be considered as an interim measure until passive restoration methods have increased recruitment sufficiently.

Urban Park Restoration and the “Museumification” of Nature

Ecological restoration is becoming an increasingly popular means of managing urban natural areas for human and environmental values. But although urban ecological restorations can foster unique, positive relationships between people and nature, the scope of these interactions is often restricted to particular activities and experiences, especially in city park settings. Drawing on personal experiences and research on urban park restorations in Chicago and San Francisco, I explore the phenomenon of this “museumification” in terms of its revision of landscape and land use history, how it presents nature through restoration design and implementation, and its potential impacts on the nature experiences of park users, particularly children. I conclude that although museum-type restorations might be necessary in some cases, alternative models for the management of urban natural areas may provide a better balance between goals of achieving authenticity in ecological restorations and authenticity of nature experiences.

Using Long-term Monitoring of Fen Hydrology and Vegetation to Underpin Wetland Restoration Strategies

How can long-term monitoring of hydrological and ecological parameters support management strategies aimed towards wetland restoration and re-creation in a complex hydrological system? Drought impact and subsequent hydrological recovery over a 22-year period are quantified. Vegetation data display strong moisture and successional gradients. Analysis shows a shift from grassland communities toward mire communities across much of the site. The site is regionally unique in that it has a detailed long-term monitoring record. Hydrological data and vegetation survey have allowed the impact of the most recent ‘groundwater’ drought (1989– 1997) to be quantified. This information on system resilience, combined with eco-hydrological analyses of plant community-water regime/quality relationships, provide a basis for recommendations concerning conservation and restoration.

Using Tropical Forest Ecosystem Goods and Services for Planning Climate Change Adaptation with Implications for Food Security and Poverty Reduction

strategies for these selected development sectors. This is a highly crucial area with great policy implications.

Wet Meadow Restoration in Western Europe: A Quantitative Assessment of the Effectiveness of Several Techniques

Techniques such as rewetting, topsoil removal, diaspore transfer or combinations of these are increasingly applied in fen meadow and flood meadow restoration in Western Europe. In this paper, we present a quantitative assessment of the effectiveness of the commonly used meadow restoration methods. We use the change in ‘saturation index’ to evaluate the degree of success. The index reflects the completeness of restored communities in comparison to regional target communities.

When Worlds Collide

Human-assisted migration is a solution that some people find scary. It pits our desire to prevent extinctions against deep-rooted values of preserving ecosystems in their native state. And it involves a level of human meddling that some have called hubris. But the big picture is more complicated than that. If predictions are right, then climate change over the next 200 years will make anything that a few wayward naturalists do look tame. It will melt away biological communities that we know today, shuffling the deck of surviving species into new ecosystems.

Aplicaciones Pra_cticas para la Conservacio_n y Restauracio_n de Humedales y Otros Ecosistemas Acua_ticos

La necesidad de manejar los ecosistemas de manera adecuada para garantizar un provechamiento sostenible de los recursos naturales y la conservacion de la biodiversidad, obliga a incorporar de manera eficiente diversas estrategias.

Artificial Reefs as a Restoration Tool for Alaska’s Coastal Waters

Currently, viable restoration options for mitigating habitat loss in Alaska’s coastal waters are limited. At the same time, restoration methods applied in lower latitude marine habitats have not been explored in sub-Arctic marine ecosystems. Testing the efficacy of potential restoration tools in these ecosystems is necessary to determine effective enhancement and restoration options for Alaska’s nearshore waters. Artificial reefs (AR) are commonly deployed in temperate to tropical marine waters for the purpose of enhancing fish abundance, or restoring habitat following the degradation or loss of natural structure to anthropogenic or acute natural events.

Bringing Back Nature into Cities: Urban Land Environments, Indigenous Cover and Urban Restoration

The restoration of urban ecosystems is an increasingly important strategy to maintain and enhance indigenous biodiversity as well as reconnecting people to the environment. High levels of endemism, the sensitivity of species that have evolved without humans, and the invasion of exotic species have all contributed to severe depletion of indigenous biodiversity in New Zealand. In this work, we analysed national patterns of urban biodiversity in New Zealand and the contribution that urban restoration can make to maximising and enhancing indigenous biodiversity.

California Grassland Restoration

Restoration of California grasslands, once thought to be nearly impossible (Sampson et al. 1951; Heady 1988) is now under way at many sites, although usually with less ambitious goals than the complete eradication of exotics or complete ecological restoration as defined above. Restoration offers the hope of creating a landscape that is more weed-resistant, maintains its productivity over time and other ecosystem services, and is somewhat tolerant or resilient to a variety of stresses. A broad continuum of effort exists from small-scale landscaping and creation of prairie gardens, to landscape architecture projects focused on native grasses, to larger scale reclamation and full “ecological restoration” as defined above.