The Myths of Restoration Ecology

By R. H. Hilderbrand, A. Watts, April M. Randle. 2005

535 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Humanity’s ever-increasing ability to effect environmental change on a number of spatial and temporal scales requires tough decisions about how we view, value, and manage ecosystems. For example, advances in agriculture that support vastly more people per unit area than hunting and gathering are clearly a positive outcome for society. However, many beneficial land-use practices, including agriculture, may ultimately degrade ecosystems. To function as a society, some amount of ecosystem alteration must occur to support the human population, but we are ultimately dependent on ecosystem services. Our actions both intentionally and unwittingly alter the goods and services of many ecosystems on which we rely, and by entering into this relationship of altering ecosystems, we incur responsibility to our neighbors and to future generations. However, the difficult decisions have largely been avoided by the expectations and confidence in conservation and, in particular, ecological restoration.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7f537d446dda3729b93d94bfaffd5a1a3c1e485

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Ecosystem structure, function, and restoration success: Are they related? (2006, background): “In this wider context, restoration encompasses independent changes in structure and function, and multiple alternative states may not constitute partial steps towards restoration (Hilderbrand et al. 2005; Yates & Hobbs 1997), but alternative potential reference states.”
Stretch Goals and Backcasting: Approaches for Overcoming Barriers to Large‐Scale Ecological Restoration (2006, background): “Long-term planning and funding is needed because attaining some of the more ambitious goals may take considerably longer than a human lifetime (Hilderbrand et al. 2005).”
Restoration Ecology: Interventionist Approaches for Restoring and Maintaining Ecosystem Function in the Face of Rapid Environmental Change (2008, background): “(35) has recently suggested that restoration often rests on a series of myths which are based on assumptions regarding how systems work and what the outcome of particular”
Integrating plant- and animal-based perspectives for more effective restoration of biodiversity (2016, background): “Many approaches are based on a “fi eld of dreams” strategy, which emphasizes the re- creation of structural attributes with little attention paid to biotic responses and assumes that degraded areas will progress toward the intended state (Hilderbrand et al. 2005 ).”
Faustian bargains? Restoration realities in the context of biodiversity offset policies (2012, background): “Even if an offset goal is measurable and the uncertainty of it being achieved is low, there are often unavoidable time lags before the goal is realized (Zedler, 1996; Hilderbrand et al., 2005; Morris et al., 2006).”