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1. Inclusion of Biodiversity in Habitat Restoration Policy to Facilitate Ecosystem Recovery: Biodiversity in habitat restoration

   https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12419  

   Hughes, A. Randall ; Grabowski, Jonathan H. ; Leslie, Heather M. ; Scyphers, Steven ; Williams, Susan L. ( May 2018 , Conservation Letters)
2. Optimal Planting Distance in a Simple Model of Habitat Restoration With an Allee Effect

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2020.610412  

   Hammann, Liv ; Silliman, Brian ; Blasius, Bernd ( January 2021 , Frontiers in Marine Science)

   Ecological restoration is emerging as an important strategy to improve the recovery of degraded lands and to combat habitat and biodiversity loss worldwide. One central unresolved question revolves around the optimal spatial design for outplanted propagules that maximizes restoration success. Essentially, two contrasting paradigms exist: the first aims to plant propagules in dispersed arrangements to minimize competitive interactions. In contrast, ecological theory and recent field experiments emphasize the importance of positive species interactions, suggesting instead clumped planting configurations. However, planting too many propagules too closely is likely to waste restoration resources as larger clumps have less edges and have relatively lower spread rates. Thus, given the constraint of limited restoration efforts, there should be an optimal planting distance that both is able to harness positive species interactions but at the same time maximizes spread in the treated area. To explore these ideas, here we propose a simple mathematical model that tests the influence of positive species interactions on the optimal design of restoration efforts. We model the growth and spatial spread of a population starting from different initial conditions that represent either clumped or dispersed configurations of planted habitat patches in bare substrate. We measure the spatio-temporal development of the population, its relative and absolute growth rates as well as the time-discounted population size and its dependence on the presence of an Allee effect. Finally, we assess whether clumped or dispersed configurations perform better in our models and qualitatively compare the simulation outcomes with a recent wetland restoration experiment in a coastal wetland. Our study shows that intermediate clumping is likely to maximize plant spread under medium and high stress conditions (high occurrence of positive interactions) while dispersed designs maximize growth under low stress conditions where competitive interactions dominate. These results highlight the value of mathematical modeling for optimizing the efficiency of restoration efforts and call for integration of this theory into practice. 

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3. A comparison of coastal habitat restoration projects in China and the United States

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-50930-6  

   Li, Shanze ; Xie, Tian ; Pennings, Steven C. ; Wang, Yuchun ; Craft, Christopher ; Hu, Mingming ( December 2019 , Scientific Reports)
4. Data system design alters meaning in ecological data: salmon habitat restoration across the U.S. Pacific Northwest

   https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.2920  

   Katz, Stephen L. ; Barnas, Katie A. ; Diaz, Monica ; Hampton, Stephanie E. ( November 2019 , Ecosphere)
5. Baltimore Ecosystem Study: Invertebrate and Restoration Habitat Data

   https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/675c0b7286358f4ba2fc991bc2af1eaa  

   Swan, Christopher ( January 2020 , Environmental Data Initiative)

   An often-cited benefit of river restoration is an increase in biodiversity or shift in composition to more desirable taxa. Yet, hard manipulations of habitat structure often fail to elicit a significant response in terms of biodiversity patterns. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the dispersal of organisms may have as large an influence on biodiversity patterns as environmental conditions. This influence of dispersal may be particularly influential in river networks which are linear branching, or dendritic, and thus constrain most dispersal to the river corridor. As such, some locations in river networks, such as isolated headwaters, are expected to respond less to environmental factors and less by dispersal than more well-connected downstream reaches. We applied this metacommunity framework to study how restoration drives biodiversity patterns in river networks. By comparing assemblage structure in headwater versus more well-connected mainstem sites, we learned that headwater restoration efforts supported higher biodiversity, exhibited more stable ecological communities compared with adjacent, un-restored reaches. Such differences were not evident in mainstem reaches. Consistent with theory and mounting empirical evidence, we attribute this finding to a relatively higher influence of dispersal-driven factors on assemblage structure in more well-connected, higher order reaches. An implication of this work is that, if biodiversity is to be a goal of restoration activity, such local manipulations of habitat should elicit a more profound response in small, isolated streams than in larger downstream reaches. These results offer another significant finding supporting the notion that restoration activity cannot proceed in isolation of larger scale, catchment level degradation. This dataset represents the microhabitat sampling. 

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