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- Title
Wetland restoration: the potential for assembly rules in the service of conservation
- Authors
Keddy, Paul
- Abstract
One of the pressing problems for applied ecologists is the efficientrestoration of structure and function to degraded ecosystems. Where some other conservation activities, such as protection of existing wilderness, continue to require making the best of increasingly bad situations, the goal of restoration raises the pleasing prospect of measurable improvement in landscapes. Restoration simultaneously providesthe ultimate test for the discipline of community ecology: ecologists should be able to build an ecosystem in the same way an engineer builds a bridge, with a list of parts connected in specified ways leading to certain reliable outcomes. Failures would reveal that scientists do not adequately understand the system. Practical considerations suggest the application of tools that already exist rather than the invention of new ones. The objective of this paper is to suggest that two valuable tools may already exist, tools that provide an intellectual foundation for restoration ecology. Such a foundation is necessarybecause there has been a tendency for restoration ecology to represent a haphazard collection of individual cases rather than a well-defined discipline with repeatable methods. One possible scheme for unifying studies of restoration is that provided by assembly rules, where predictions are based upon key environmental factors and the responses of species to those factors. The potential of such assembly rules is introduced using three examples: fish in wetlands, plants in salt marshes, and plants in prairie potholes. I then describe an experimentwhere a standard species pool of wetland plants was sown into twenty-four different sets of environmental conditions, illustrating how landscapes can select communities out of larger pools. A second possible tool is indicators of ecosystem integrity. These can measure whether a project actually works. Clear discrimination between success and failure can improve restoration procedures by accelerating the evolution
- Subjects
AMAZON River; SALT marshes; WETLANDS; LAND degradation; ICHTHYOLOGY; HYDROLOGY; EUTROPHICATION; CONSERVATION of natural resources
- Publication
Wetlands, 1999, Vol 19, Issue 4, p716
- ISSN
0277-5212
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/BF03161780