The perceived ecological and human well‐being benefits of ecosystem restoration

Abstract

Traditionally, ecosystem restoration has focussed on standard ecological indicators like water or habitat quality, species population abundance or vegetation cover to determine success. However, there is growing interest in how restoration might impact people and communities. For example, researchers have documented positive socio‐ecological links between restoration and human well‐being indicators like property value, natural hazard mitigation, recreation opportunity and happiness. Furthermore, public health benefits from restoration have been linked to public support for programmes. Drawing from this research, the United Nations declared 2021–2030 the ‘Decade of Ecosystem Restoration’ and set a goal to promote more socio‐ecological goals in ecosystem restoration. Nonetheless, there is still a lack of information on the extent to which restoration practitioners consider well‐being because many granting programmes only require ecological goals and monitoring. To explore how restoration practitioners design, implement and measure the success of their projects, we used the federally funded Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) as a case study. Since 2010, GLRI has awarded over $3.5 Billion to over 5300 projects across the midwestern United States, but it does not presently require human well‐being considerations. We performed an online survey targeting project managers with a sample of GLRI projects (N = 1574). We received 437 responses and found that almost half set a human well‐being goal, and more than 70% of those who did believe they reached it. In comparison, 90% of project managers believed they met their ecological goals. These documented perceptions of positive impacts for both people and nature suggest that restoration may already transcend traditional indicators and monitoring for socio‐ecological metrics could capture many ‘unseen’ benefits. Therefore, we recommend that ecosystem restoration programmes adopt a socio‐ecological lens to document the full extent of their restoration outcomes. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Delineating Priority Areas for Preservation and Restoration across Production–Living–Ecological Spaces in Ganzi, China

“…Biodiversity and ecosystem services are the objects of preservation and restoration, and mapping their spatial distribution characteristics is an important prerequisite for ecological conservation [9,40]. Biodiversity includes genetic diversity, species diversity, and ecosystem diversity, each of which has its own quantitative methods.…”

“…Preservation, on the other hand, attempts to preserve intact habitats and the biodiversity and ecosystem services therein [13,59], and one of the main strategies is to establish protected areas [59,61]. For ecosystem management, the relative priority of preservation and restoration depends on their cost, benefit, and the different time lags inherent in the two actions [15,26,40]. In practice, preservation and restoration are often used as complementary tools for ecosystem management, and both are key components of conservation strategies aimed at optimizing biodiversity conservation or ecosystem service delivery [15,40]; there is an increasing interdisciplinary trend in the literature [58].…”

“…For ecosystem management, the relative priority of preservation and restoration depends on their cost, benefit, and the different time lags inherent in the two actions [15,26,40]. In practice, preservation and restoration are often used as complementary tools for ecosystem management, and both are key components of conservation strategies aimed at optimizing biodiversity conservation or ecosystem service delivery [15,40]; there is an increasing interdisciplinary trend in the literature [58]. By overlaying the maps of comprehensive ecosystem importance, ECR, and human footprint, our approach integrates ecological, social, and economic factors simultaneously to determine preservation and restoration priority areas and provides a practical approach to guide ecological management at the regional scale [19,30].…”