Brent D. Ryan first visited Detroit in 1993. Describing this experience, he says: ‘‘The sense of emptiness was overpowering. ... I felt as if I was walking into the ruin of America.’’ In his book ‘‘Design after decline—how America rebuilds shrinking cities,’’ Ryan tries to understand why so many American cities have been losing population, what was and is done to change the fortune of these cit...

Restoration ecology had its genesis in the 1930s as Midwestern ecologists came to the realization that nearly all the tallgrass prairie in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin had been converted to agricultural or urban land uses (Curtis and Greene 1949, Critical Trends Assessment Project 1994, Smith 1998). While calls for preservation of remaining prairie in Iowa began by 1919 (Smith 1998), the pione...

Current literature on restorative environments generally shows the importance of urban natural landscapes in increasing perceived restorativeness of urban environments. However, little is known about the positive role of visual characteristics of urban natural landscapes in increasing Perceived Restorative Potential (PRP) of urban environments. This study aimed to understand the role of four pr...

RVR Meander was developed as a toolbox for modeling restoration and naturalization processes in rivers. This model includes Windows-based and Geographical Information System-based programs for analyzing and modeling planform migration of streams. In the past, several rivers have been channelized causing environmental and ecological problems. Restoration techniques evolve as natural solutions to...

The objectives of this study were to document avian species inhabiting West River Memorial Park in New Haven, Connecticut and develop goals for restoration of a salt marsh bird community. Restoration goals were based on the breeding season bird community at the restoration site, breeding season communities of less disturbed salt marshes, and a literature review. Community descriptions included ...

Fully optical fiber networks that transmit large quantities of information due to multiple applications or because they serve large urban areas need to be maintained fault-free at all times of their operation. The protection and restoration strategies are critical because they provide optical network survivability from a variety of failure scenarios that can occur in this environment. The topol...

A great deal has been accomplished during the past decade in the area of urban wildlife conservation, restoration, and management. Natural resource managers and agencies have been responsible for initiating a wide variety of ambitious and innovative programs and policies, helping to gain new awareness and appreciation of the value of conserving and enhancing wildlife habitat and species in urba...

The accumulation of fire fuels in forests throughout the world contributes significantly to the severity of wildfires. To combat the threat of wildfire, especially in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), US federal land management agencies have implemented a number of forest restoration and wildfire risk reduction programs. In the spirit of revealed preference analyses, the objective of this stu...

Lake Jeziorak Mały is a shallow urban lake where storm water pretreatment separators and a fountain-based water aeration system were installed as protective-restoration measures to enhance water quality. We investigated the effect of these procedures on phytoplankton dynamics and physicochemical properties in the littoral and pelagial zones in 1996-2003, 2005, and 2013. A decrease in cyanobacte...

The Central Valley of California is one of the most important regions for wintering waterbirds in North America despite extensive anthropogenic landscape modification and decline of historical wetlands there. Like many other mediterranean-climate ecosystems across the globe, the Central Valley has been subject to a burgeoning human population and expansion and intensification of agricultural an...