Restoration of living environment based on vegetation ecology: Theory and practice

Abstract

The foundation of ecological restoration is how to preserve biocoenoses (i.e. functional ecosystems) and how to restore and reconstruct them where they were destroyed. One of the most important challenges is the restoration of complex, multilayer forests representing the potential natural vegetation. Native forests have functions in disaster mitigation and environmental protection, as well as providing the basis of existence for local people and maintaining gene pools for the future. Through vegetation surveys in Japan and South-east Asia, we have established basic principles in vegetation-ecological restoration of forests. We have been restoring expected disaster-mitigation and environmental protection forests, as experimental reforestation projects, since the 1970s at more than 750 sites throughout the 3000 km long Japanese Archipelago, and since the 1980s in parts of South-east Asia, China and South America. The restoration movement has spread from a local activity to a global movement. We aim for the sustainable development of human society through ecological restoration of living environments.

Distribution patterns of shrubby N‐fixers and non‐N fixers in an arid valley in Southwest China: implications for ecological restoration

“…This region is very unfavorable for the regeneration of tree species ; revegetating with native shrubs may be ecologically reasonable. In fact, natural recovery of vegetation is gaining increasing attention in various restoration projects (Karel and Petr 2001;Miyawaki 2004;Li et al 2008b). Therefore, we urgently need to enhance the present restoration methods and theories following the community succession principles, for example, selecting suitable native species from the potential natural vegetation.…”

Plant species composition in relation to green cover configuration and function of urban parks in Beijing, China

“…Thus, rapidly growing cities are unique ecosystems with distinctive species compositions and unique collections of habitats (Sukopp and Werner 1983;Gilbert 1989;Bastin and Thomas 1999;Olff and Ritchie 2002;Zerbe et al 2003;Miyawaki 2004). Consequently, conservation and enhancement of the biodiversity within urbanized area have grown in importance as two of the major objectives in regional or worldwide conservation strategies.…”

Combining the Conservation of Biodiversity with the Provision of Ecosystem Services in Urban Green Infrastructure Planning: Critical Features Arising from a Case Study in the Metropolitan Area of Rome

“…Therefore, we consider ecological coherence as species suitability for specific combinations of climatic, litho-morpholgical and edaphic conditions, i.e., coherence with the potential natural vegetation and related natural substitution communities [57,58]. As the natural bio-physical setting is never totally hidden by urbanization, even in the very center of cities [59,60], and as native and ecologically coherent forests and trees grow well with little or no management [61,62], both biogeographic representativity and ecological coherence should be targeted for the conservation of biodiversity in urban regions [63].…”