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Abstract The United Nations General Assembly designated 2021–2030 as the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Meeting this international mandate requires developing, testing, refining, and implementing evidence-based approaches that will significantly increase restoration performance and accessibility. Approaches that apply ecological theories of community organization and species interactions have generally been underused in restoration but can enhance performance and provide opportunities for expanding multispecies conservation. We review how co-occurring habitat-forming species collectively enhance biodiversity, habitat heterogeneity, niche complementarity, and amelioration of physical stress. We show how successive beneficial interactions between foundation species—facilitation cascades—can be used in restoration to increase local biodiversity, enhance and provide additional ecosystem functions, and strengthen resistance to environmental stress and pace of regrowth. Approaches that incorporate co-occurring foundation species’ interactions can create a critical step change to advance restoration of biodiverse and resilient ecosystems at the pace and scale required to achieve now seemingly out-of-reach restoration targets.
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Biodiversity in changing environments: An external‐driver internal‐topology framework to guide intervention
Abstract Accompanying the climate crisis is the more enigmatic biodiversity crisis. Rapid reorganization of biodiversity due to global environmental change has defied prediction and tested the basic tenets of conservation and restoration. Conceptual and practical innovation is needed to support decision making in the face of these unprecedented shifts. Critical questions include: How can we generalize biodiversity change at the community level? When are systems able to reorganize and maintain integrity, and when does abiotic change result in collapse or restructuring? How does this understanding provide a template to guide when and how to intervene in conservation and restoration? To this end, we frame changes in community organization as the modulation of external abiotic drivers on the internal topology of species interactions, using plant–plant interactions in terrestrial communities as a starting point. We then explore how this framing can help translate available data on species abundance and trait distributions to corresponding decisions in management. Given the expectation that community response and reorganization are highly complex, the external‐driver internal‐topology (EDIT) framework offers a way to capture general patterns of biodiversity that can help guide resilience and adaptation in changing environments.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2044006
- PAR ID:
- 10546290
- Publisher / Repository:
- Ecological Society of America
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Ecology
- Volume:
- 105
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 0012-9658
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4322
