Restoration
What if We’re Wrong
So this is what it feels like to be in the throes of a paradigm shift. It turns out that much of what we think we know about species and ecosystems is wrong.
The Look of Success
IN THE WAKE OF SUCCESSFUL WOLF REINTRODUCTIONS, managers who once fervently defended wolves are now faced with killing them. Are we ready for modern predator management?
Restoration Mistakenly Helps Pest Gulls
Habitat restoration can have unexpected and unwanted effects. New research shows that restoration efforts on a small Mediterranean island helped a gull that was already superabundant and that preys on two at-risk seabirds.
Fueling Restoration
A NEW SYSTEM Links ecological restoration to the hydrogen economy
Restoration as Weed Control
China has both the largest human population and the largest continuous grassland in the world, and the former makes it hard to protect the latter. So many people are grazing livestock in the Inner Mongolian steppes that the steppes are being destroyed.
Dung Could Help Restore Mediterranean Grasslands
Getting the right seeds for grassland restoration is hard — collecting them in the wild is time consuming, and commercial mixes typically lack rare species. New research suggests that cows can be used to both collect and package Mediterranean grassland seeds: dung from cattle grazing in diverse grasslands may help restore grasslands that have lost species.
Habitat Diversity Critical to Restoration
Restoration efforts often over-look the importance of “phenotype diversity,” or non-heritable variations in morphology and behavior that suit different parts of a habitat.
Restoration as Weed Control
Although it makes sense that restoring native plants could help control invasive weeds, no one knows if it would really work. New research makes a good case for this approach: restoring tallgrass prairie in old fields decreased the weed biomass by nearly 95 percent.
Strip Mines: Aligning Reclamation with Conservation
Despite the fact that strip mines can destroy entire mountain tops in the Appalachians, mine reclamation mandates focus on short-term fixes instead of ecosystem restoration. New research shows that although reclaimed mines can look good, even after 30 years they are still missing about half of the plant species found in unmined forests.
Creating Habitat on Farms
THE LAND STEWARDSHIP PROJECT and Monitoring on Agricultural Land