Reforming Watershed Restoration: Science in Need of Application and Applications in Need of Science |
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Authors: | Margaret A Palmer |
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Institution: | (1) Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Solomons, MD 20688, USA |
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Abstract: | Coastal and inland waters are continuing to decline in many parts of the world despite major efforts made to restore them.
This is due in part to the inadequate role that ecological science has played in shaping restoration efforts. A significant
amount of fundamental ecological knowledge dealing with issues such as system dynamics, state changes, context-dependency
of ecological response, and diversity is both under-used by managers and practitioners and under-developed by ecologists for
use in real-world applications. Some of the science that is being ‘used’ has not been adequately tested. Thus, restoration
ecology as a science and ecological restoration as a practice are in need of reform. I identify five ways in which our ecological
knowledge should be influencing restoration to a far greater extent than at present including a need to: shift the focus to
restoration of process and identification of the limiting factors instead of structures and single species, add ecological
insurance to all projects, identify a probabilistic range of possible outcomes instead of a reference condition, expand the
spatial scale of efforts, and apply hierarchical approaches to prioritization. Prominent examples of restoration methods or
approaches that are commonly used despite little evidence to support their efficacy are highlighted such as the use of only
structural enhancements to restore biodiversity. There are also major gaps in scientific knowledge that are of immediate need
to policy makers, managers, and restoration practitioners including: predictive frameworks to guide the restoration of ecological
processes, identification of social-ecological feedbacks that constrain ecosystem recovery and data to support decisions of
where and how to implement restoration projects to achieve the largest gains. I encourage ecologists to respond to the demand
for their scientific input so that restoration can shift from an engineering-driven process to a more sustainable enterprise
that fully integrates ecological processes and social science methods. |
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