Restoration Success: How Is It Being Measured?

Abstract

The criteria of restoration success should be clearly established to evaluate restoration projects. Recently, the Society of Ecological Restoration International (SER) has produced a Primer that includes ecosystem attributes that should be considered when evaluating restoration success. To determine how restoration success has been evaluated in restoration projects, we reviewed articles published in Restoration Ecology (Vols. 1[1]-11[4]). Specifically, we addressed the following questions:(1) what measures of ecosystem attributes are assessed and (2) how are these measures used to determine restoration success. No study has measured all the SER Primer attributes, but most studies did include at least one measure in each of three general categories of the ecosystem attributes: diversity, vegetation structure, and ecological processes. Most of the reviewed studies are using multiple measures to evaluate restoration success, but we would encourage future projects to include: (1) at least two variables within each of the three ecosystem attributes that clearly related to ecosystem functioning and (2) at least two reference sites to capture the variation that exist in ecosystems.

Ecological restoration of farmland: progress and prospects

“…However, there is no worldwide compendium of species that have been identified explicitly in farmland ecological restoration contexts. The process of ecological restoration can be long-lasting and determinants of endpoints can be difficult to ascertain (Ormerod 2003;Ruiz-Jaen & Aide 2005). Nonetheless, the synchrony of restoration efforts with plant and animal lifecycles has been highlighted (Goulson et al 2002;Pywell et al 2005b).…”

“…Much work remains to be done to define and test the effectiveness of these agri-environmental schemes for various taxa and ecosystem services (Kleijn & Sutherland 2003;Pywell et al 2005b). Further, the conservation status and ecology of many taxa remain poorly studied (Baillie et al 2004) making it challenging to identify both focal sites and landscapes within which restoration efforts are most likely to succeed (Summerville et al 2005) and accurately gauge restoration success (Purcell et al 2004;Ruiz-Jaen & Aide 2005). The potential for ecological restoration of farmland to improve the sustainability of agriculture production is clearly high but there is still much to learn as the field of restoration ecology develops over the course of this century.…”

“…A directed approach for managing plant biodiversity is preferred to a shotgun approach that could inadvertently pose negative side effects (Gurr et al 2004). The monitoring of restoration projects should include the restored sites as well as unrestored and intact reference sites, to evaluate, albeit problematic, the level of restoration success against the nominal objectives and accepted attributes of a restored ecosystem (Ruiz-Jaen & Aide 2005). In this context, it is important to reconcile differences between those methods that favour conservation and those that favour economic returns, to ensure that conservation efforts are mutually beneficial for the landowners and for biodiversity (Banks 2004).…”

“…In practice, however, monitoring rarely lasts for more than 5 years, even though this may be too short a period (Ruiz-Jaen & Aide 2005). The specifics of determining how long the ecological restoration takes in terms of reaching an 'endpoint' and how frequently monitoring should be conducted is highly site-specific and rather controversial, partly because it is hard to determine (Ormerod 2003;Ruiz-Jaen & Aide 2005). This issue will be discussed further in §7.…”

Coral reef metrics and habitat equivalency analysis

“…Unlike ecosystem goods -which are harvests of environmental products for direct human use [39] -such as subsistence or recreational fisheries -many ecosystem services never pass though an economic open market to obtain an actual market value. Due to these complications, most injury assessment studies use indicators of ecological services [40] rather than measuring ecosystem services directly. Thus, in an NRDA, the quantity of compensatory restoration required to offset service losses as a result of an injury is not calculated by directly measuring a comprehensive suite of ecosystem services, but is instead often determined by habitat equivalency analysis (HEA) or resource equivalency analysis (REA) [26,[41][42][43][44].…”