Ideas About Restoration

Some Ideas About Forest Restoration:

* Dr. Reed Noss, the noted conservation biologist, stated in A Citizen's Guide to Ecosystem Management:

"I believe that ecosystem conservation in some cases is best achieved by hands-off preservation. Forest ecologist Bob Zahner has stated this point of view eloquently in reference to the second-growth forests of the southern Appalachians: 'For most restoration needs…I advocate the choice of benign neglect management, where the decision is to let nature heal herself.' For these and ecologically similar forests, where they exist in patches large enough to escape edge effects, I agree with Zahner. On the other hand, benign neglect has not worked out well for many other ecosystem types, such as the fire-dependent communities listed in Table 2. Rather, neglect-or worse, fire suppression and livestock grazing-has led to a steady decline in native biodiversity as fire-sensitive species have invaded from off-site, out-competing fire-dependent species. For an increasing proportion of our native ecosystems, meeting conservation goals requires hands-on management. Nevertheless, I hope this management turns out to be only a temporary necessity. The ideal future landscape is one where nature again manages itself and humans live in harmony with other species. Without this idealistic, long-term vision, we risk being caught in a trap of ever-increasing manipulation of ecosystems."

* The Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) defines "ecological restoration" as "Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery and management of ecological integrity. Ecological integrity includes a critical range of variability in biodiversity, ecological processes and structures, regional and historical context, and sustainable cultural practices."  The SER also sets out "Strategic Environmental Values of Restoration":

"The Society for Ecological Restoration recognizes that the restoration and management of historical ecosystems contribute towards the solution of strategic environmental needs, including but not limited to the following: 

"1. retention of precipitation in order to maintain the integrity of the hydrologic cycle;

"2. diversification of habitat, which augments the diversity of both predator and prey species and can thereby enhance the biological control of pest organisms; 

"3. stabilization of substrates, which prevents erosion and promotes the formation of topsoil;

"4. augmentation of habitat, which harbors the genetic diversity required for future adaptability, including improvements in economic species; 

"5. retention and enhancement of biodiversity; 

"6. preservation of land-based cultural traditions for indigenous peoples, including traditional indigenous environmental knowledge; 

"7. storage of carbon and thus the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."

* As set out by Leslie Jones Sauer in The Once and Future Forest (Island Press 1998):

"Our approach to restoring landscapes is in part directed by how we define the health of an ecosystem.  But what is ecosystem 'health'?  It depends.  In its broadest sense, Aldo Leopold (1949) defined ecosystem health as ' the capacity of the land for self-renewal.'  It is the exact opposite of ecosystem degradation, defined by James Karr of the University of Washington as 'biotic impoverishment,' or the 'systematic reduction in the capacity of the earth to support living systems' (Karr 1992).  For commercial purposes, forest managers define it as productivity: the vigor of individual trees; their resistance to stress, disease, and pests; and their rate of growth expressed in yields of logs ultimately.  Those interested in sustaining old growth forest look at a different set of factors, such as an uneven-aged and multi-layered forest with many gaps, abundant ancient trees, and large amounts of dead wood--conditions that support many rare and specialist species.

"Hammish Kimmins, with the Department of Forest Sciences at the University of British Columbia, proposes a definition that centers on sustaining all the components of the landscape and the processes that drive the system.  He sets two conditions for ecosystem health in a forest landscape:

• "The pattern of forest ages, ecological conditions, and seral stages is within, or close to, the range of these variables that is characteristic for that landscape.

• "The scale, severity, pattern, and frequency of disturbance do not impair the landscape-level processes that are responsible for providing, at the overall landscape scale, a sustained supply of all the values that are desired from that landscape, or for the recovery of that landscape following a disturbance to a condition that once again provides those values.  (1996, 99)."

What is required for restoration of a particular forest stand will vary widely, depending on the natural forest types of that area, the current conditions, the surrounding landscape, and the desires of the land's owner.  It must be remembered that we can never "restore" a piece of land to just what it was like in some point in the distant past; we cannot put part of southeastern America back just like it was in 1500.

One possible goal of restoration is to heal ecological degradation while maintaining and enhancing ecosystem integrity, natural dynamics, and the capacity of the land to heal itself.