Many ecosystems have been transformed, or degraded by human use, and restoration offers an opportunity to recover services and benefits, not to mention intrinsic values. We assessed whether restoration scientists and practitioners use their projects to demonstrate the benefits restoration can provide in their peer-reviewed publications. We evaluated a sample of the academic literature to determine whether links are made explicit between ecological restoration, society, and public policy related to natural capital. We analyzed 1,582 peer-reviewed papers dealing with ecological restoration published between 1 January 2000 and 30 September 2008 in 13 leading scientific journals. As selection criterion, we considered papers that contained either "restoration" or "rehabilitation" in their title, abstract, or keywords. Furthermore, as one-third of the papers were published in Restoration Ecology, we used that journal as a reference for comparison with all the other journals. We readily acknowledge that aquatic ecosystems are under-represented, and that the largely inaccessible gray literature was ignored. Within these constraints, we found clear evidence that restoration practitioners are failing to signal links between ecological restoration, society, and policy, and are underselling the evidence of benefits of restoration as a worthwhile investment for society. We discuss this assertion and illustrate it with samples of our findings-with regards to (1) the geographical and institutional affiliations of authors; (2) the choice of ecosystems studied, methods employed, monitoring schemes applied, and the spatial scale of studies; and (3) weak links to payments for ecosystem service setups, agriculture, and ramifications for public policy.

RAPDs and chloroplast microsatellites were used to quantify the genetic variation of Vitellaria paradoxa (an economically important tree species in sub-Saharan Africa, north of the equator) and to analyse the geographic distribution of diversity in relation to the refuge theory. A total of 13 locations were sampled in eight countries, covering most of the natural range from Senegal to Uganda. A total of 67 polymorphic and 15 monomorphic RAPD loci were detected in 179 individuals. No relationship was identified between diversity and longitude or latitude. An unrooted neighbourjoining tree suggested a western group and an eastern group, representing 7% (P ¼ 0.000) of the total variation. A Mantel test suggested that genetic distances between populations were correlated to geographic distances (R ¼ 0.88, P ¼ 0.001). The three-chloroplast microsatellite primers, assayed in 116 individuals, revealed 10 different alleles and seven chlorotypes. Most of the populations comprised a single haplotype. It is proposed from these results that the difference between western and eastern populations results from putative refugia separated by the current 'Dahomey Gap' (a semiarid zone that meets the coast around the Ghana-Togo-Benin-Nigeria borders), an area that may have been exceptionally dry during glacial periods. In addition, it is suggested that the haplotype distribution and frequency in the western populations could be due to the more recent impact of humans, particularly shea tree selection and dispersal during traditional agroforestry.

The world's large and rapidly growing human population is exhausting Earth's natural capital at ever-faster rates, and yet appears mostly oblivious to the fact that these resources are limited. This is dangerous for our well-being and perhaps for our survival, as documented by numerous studies over many years. Why are we not moving instead toward sustainable levels of use? We argue here that this disconnection between our knowledge and our actions is largely caused by three "great divides": an ideological divide between economists and ecologists; an economic development divide between the rich and the poor; and an information divide, which obstructs communications between scientists, public opinion, and policy makers. These divides prevent our economies from responding effectively to urgent signals of environmental and ecological stress. The restoration of natural capital (RNC) can be an important strategy in bridging all of these divides. RNC projects and programs make explicit the multiple and mutually reinforcing linkages between environmental and economic well-being, while opening up a promising policy road in the search for a sustainable and desirable future for global society. The bridge-building capacity of RNC derives from its double focus: on the ecological restoration of degraded, overexploited natural ecosystems, and on the full socio-economic and ecological interface between people and their environments.

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