Evaluating Ecological Restoration Success: A Review of the Literature

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.

Fighting carbon loss of degraded peatlands by jump-starting ecosystem functioning with ecological restoration

“…Reprinted with kind permission of Wiley © Almost everywhere around the globe, human land use has caused extensive degradation of natural landscapes accompanied with extinctions of species and loss of ecosystem services to an extent that it already poses a threat to the longterm sustainability of humanity itself (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005;Rockström et al 2009;Ellis 2011;. This has caused ecological restoration to be raised to a major strategy for reversing the biodiversity losses and increasing the provision of ecosystem services Halme et al 2013;Wortley et al 2013). The importance of restoration as a fundamental conservation strategy is further highlighted by its entry to the premier transnational political convention according to which 15 % of the degraded ecosystems should be restored by 2020 (Convention on Biological Diversity 2010).…”

“…The goal of ecological restoration is the recovery of ecosystems' structures and functions, for example species community composition and carbon sequestration capacity respectively Society for Ecological Restoration International 2004;Shackelford et al 2013;Kareksela et al 2014). However, while some encouraging empirical evidence exists that ecological restoration succeeds in recovering some of the degraded biodiversity and ecosystem services, values of both often remain lower in restored than in the targeted reference ecosystems Wortley et al 2013). Moreover, in many cases there is still much uncertainty as to how effective ecological restoration really is , and the number of empirical evaluations about the true effectiveness of ecological restoration has only recently started to increase (Wortley et al 2013).…”

“…However, while some encouraging empirical evidence exists that ecological restoration succeeds in recovering some of the degraded biodiversity and ecosystem services, values of both often remain lower in restored than in the targeted reference ecosystems Wortley et al 2013). Moreover, in many cases there is still much uncertainty as to how effective ecological restoration really is , and the number of empirical evaluations about the true effectiveness of ecological restoration has only recently started to increase (Wortley et al 2013). Indeed, serious doubts have been cast for example on the ability of ecological restoration to really be able to recover the ecosystem services and to deliver biodiversity offsets such that losses at the impact site would be genuinely compensated by restoring a degraded site elsewhere ).…”

“…Hence, to some extent, the concerns about not achieving the restoration goals Wortley et al 2013) may reflect the time constraint combined with the impatience due to urgency of the matter. In other words, our expectations sometimes appear to be based on high hopes rather than profound understanding of the expected development of the degraded ecosystems after restoration.…”

“…Reproduced from Encouraging empirical evidence exists that ecological restoration succeeds in recovering some of the degraded biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, values of both often remain lower in restored than in the targeted reference ecosystems , Wortley et al 2013. Moreover, in many cases there is still much uncertainty as to how effective ecological restoration really is , and the number of empirical evaluations about the true effectiveness of ecological restoration has only recently started to increase (Wortley et al 2013).…”