Ecological Restoration

▪ 1999

by Stephanie Mills

      Ecological restoration (the rapidly developing practice of healing damaged lands and waters) is grounded in the emerging scientific discipline of restoration ecology. The science and the practice are mutually informing. Restoration practices are as varied as natural communities themselves, but the basic idea is to return a particular place—be it a small nature preserve or a whole river basin—to a condition closely resembling its primal state. This may entail reestablishing the structures and functions of ecosystems as well as reintroducing native flora and fauna. The long-term objective is to foster the continuing existence, interaction, and evolution of the restored ecosystem's indigenous species of plants and animals (including humans). Because ecosystem dynamics are intricate, seldom obvious, and far easier to disrupt than to recreate, ecological restoration involves discovery, invention, and no little urgency.

      As we approach the 21st century, scientists agree that we are in the most rapid extinction crisis in the Earth's history. These mass extinctions are the result of habitat disturbance—ecosystem disruption—which is driven by dramatic increases in the human population and the consumption of natural resources that is concomitant with economic activity. Ecological restoration endeavours to be a holistic means of arresting this loss of species, and many ecological restorationists hope through their work to bring humanity into a mutually sustaining relationship with the Earth's biodiversity. Although there are professional restorationists, many of them biologists and/or landscape architects, much ecological restoration is accomplished by volunteers. Since its first annual conference in 1989, the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), headquartered at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has fostered the growth and development of an international and interdisciplinary community of restorationists.

      In the mountainous Pacific Northwest citizen groups and governments from the local to the national levels have been working for 20 years to restore the salmon runs of their creeks and rivers, slowly regenerating their watersheds from ridgelines to river mouths. North Pacific salmon restoration spans the ocean. On the Japanese island of Hokkaido Sapporo's schoolchildren have been promoting practices to improve water quality, hauling rubbish out of urban creeks and releasing hatchery-nurtured salmon fingerlings into the city's Toyohiro River. On Thailand's coasts villagers restore and manage their living resources, replanting mangrove trees to stabilize the shorelines and serve as nurseries for fish. In the waters off the Maldives, the Global Coral Reef Alliance has used solar-generated electric current to accrete minerals from ocean water to form anchorages for coral. The alliance's inventors have found that a continuing flow of the low-voltage current also stimulates the growth of coral transplanted to the anchorages. Thus, some of the devastation of coral reefs worldwide may be mitigated, and natural breakwaters, which help protect shorelines from erosion, may be created.

      In Redwood National Park, California, watershed restoration has employed bulldozers and backhoes to remove logging roads and log-skidding trails. This resculpting is needed to check erosion on the slopes and sedimentation in the streams so that the terrain will once again be hospitable to giant redwoods and to the animal species requiring conditions unique to that region's ancient forests. The successes among such slow-growing species as redwoods may not be apparent for centuries, yet the auspicious beginnings are on the increase.

      To heal the 20,000-ha (50,000-ac) man-made moonscape around the nickel mines and smelters of Sudbury, Ont., restorationists reduced the ground's pollution-caused acidity by spreading crushed limestone by hand and from the air; then they sowed grasses and planted pine, larch, oak, and locust seedlings. With public and private funds, as well as thousands of paid and volunteer workers, Sudbury has, since the early 1970s, revegetated perhaps one-quarter of its most severely damaged surroundings and restored some natural beauty to the city and the region.

      The widespread transport of plants and animals across formerly insurmountable geographic boundaries such as mountains and oceans has resulted in habitat-disturbing alien invasions. For example, islands where the flora and fauna may have evolved with no need for defense against terrestrial predators or grazers such as house cats or goats may lose much of their endemic biodiversity within decades once these opportunistic domesticated animals have come onshore. On Cuvier Island off the coast of New Zealand's North Island, the New Zealand Department of Conservation applied its effective methods of eliminating feral cats, goats, and rats. These introduced and stowaway animals had decimated the island's vegetation and consequently extirpated a number of Cuvier Island's birds, reptiles, and invertebrates. By the late 1960s and early '70s, it was possible to reintroduce some bird species that had vanished from Cuvier Island but had survived in populations on other islands nearby. In time the government hopes to reintroduce other missing bird species and a native reptile, the tuatara, which is being propagated in a captive-breeding program. Similar island-restoration projects have been under way throughout the New Zealand archipelago for the past 20 years.

      In North America, alien vegetation—some deliberately imported for landscaping, range improvement, erosion control, or forestry, and some that hitchhiked—has proliferated wildly, especially in areas where there has been land disturbance, such as farming, grazing, or logging. In many settings a single weedy species has blanketed a landscape and displaced the more complex and varied mixes of trees, shrubs, grasses, or wildflowers that made up the original plant community, along with the specific pollinators upon which certain plants depend. Using elbow grease, "weed wrenches," cane knives, and sparing doses of herbicides, restorationists battle these alien species.

      Many ecosystems depend on periodic localized disturbance for renewal, including hurricanes, floods, avalanches, earthquakes, lightning-set wildfires, and the light, cool fires set by aboriginal peoples as a subtle form of "cultivating" certain landscapes. Thus, restoring an ecosystem may require some judicious disturbance.Occasional burning, restorationists have learned, is essential to the flourishing of prairies, savannas, and the conifer forests of arid and semiarid regions. Early experiments in prairie restoration in the U.S. demonstrated the necessity of controlled burning to maintain a healthy, diverse grass and wildflower community. Since these discoveries—or rediscoveries—in the 1940s, restorationists have been refining the techniques of reinstating fire to ecosystems in need.

      Gathering and propagating the seed of endangered plants, hand-pollinating rare flowers for which insect or avian pollinators have become too scarce, clearing creeks and monitoring their recovery by counting aquatic invertebrates, pulling weeds, hacking brush, doing biological surveys of natural areas, setting fires, and even breaching dikes and dams (as is being done in Romania to restore the vast wetlands of the Danube Delta), as well as planting many millions of trees, are among the practices of ecological restoration. Altogether, as stated by U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, it is an "enormous act of the imagination."

Stephanie Mills is the author of In Service of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting Damaged Land.

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