Urban ecological restoration can produce important social benefits in addition to those biophysical improvements traditionally included in the evaluation of restoration success. Achieving social benefits requires local people to participate in planning, implementation, and evaluation of restoration. Restoration also provides experimental opportunities to study the interactions between human and...

This article addresses the implications of rapid and uncertain ecological change, and global climate change in particular, for reserve oriented and restoration oriented ecosystem management. I argue for the following conclusions: (1) rapid and uncertain ecological change undermines traditional justifications for reserve oriented and restoration oriented ecosystem management strategies; (2) it r...

Because of their vast diversity, measured by both numbers of species as well as life history traits, insects defy comprehensive conservation planning. Thus, almost all insect conservation efforts target individual species. However, serious insect conservation requires goals that are set at the faunal level and conservation success requires strategies that conserve intact communities. This task ...

Restoration projects can have varying goals, depending on the specific focus, rationale, and aims for restoration. When restoration projects use project-specific goals to define activities and gauge success without considering broader ecological context, determination of project implications and success can be confounding. We used case studies from the Middle Rio Grande (MRG), southwest USA, to...

Ecological migration policy has been proposed and implemented as a means for depopulating ecological restoration areas in the arid Northwest China. Migration intention is critical to the effectiveness of ecological migration policy. However, studies on migration intention in relation to ecological migration policy in China remain scant. Thus this paper aims to investigate the rural residents’ m...

Common decision support tools and a growing body of knowledge about ecological recovery can help inform and guide large state and federal restoration programs affecting thousands of impaired waters. Under the federal Clean Water Act (CWA), waters not meeting state Water Quality Standards due to impairment by pollutants are placed on the CWA Section 303(d) list, scheduled for Total Maximum Daily...

The widespread degradation of lotic ecosystems has prompted extensive river restoration efforts globally, but many studies have reported modest ecological responses to rehabilitation practices. The functional properties of biotic communities are rarely examined within post-project appraisals, which would provide more ecological information underpinning ecosystem responses to restoration practic...

The degradation of the world’s coral reefs has aroused growing interest in ecological restoration as a countermeasure, which is widely criticized, mainly due to cost-effectiveness concerns. Here, we propose the restocking of herbivorous fish as a restoration tool, based on supply of young fish to degraded reefs, with the aims of: (1) Buildup of a critical fish biomass for basic ecosystem functi...

This study uses travel cost and contingent valuation methods to derive estimates of economic value for recreational use of Los Nevados National Park in the Andean region of Colombia. Park visitors were surveyed regarding their travel costs and willingness-to-pay (WTP) for ecological restoration of areas affected by wildfires in 2006. The travel cost data was analyzed using a zonal travel cost m...