Restoring Resilient Ecosystems (RestREco)

包括土地退化和气候变化在内的越来越大的压力导致了全球生物多样性危机。在英国国内，回应包括政府的25年环境计划，该计划制定了一个愿景，以确保一个更具生物多样性、更具连通性和弹性的景观。自然资本委员会主张有必要确保环境净收益，这是即将出台的环境法案的一项规定。英国议会科学和技术办公室最近的一份报告强调了确保我们的自然资本的需要，不仅是为了支持生物多样性，而且还确保提供更广泛的生态系统服务。然而，关于我们如何实现环境净收益的问题仍然存在；什么应该去哪里？成功是什么样子的？重组能够可靠地提供生态系统服务的有弹性的社区可能需要多长时间？一种被广泛采用的确保环境净收益的方法是“生态恢复”。然而，使用特定的自然和半自然生态系统来定义终点的争议越来越大，因为很难定义目标“原始”状态，气候变化正在导致基线变化，而且需要恢复对未来压力具有弹性的生态系统。我们需要一个在生态恢复中寻找目标的新范例，它超越了参照系统，不依赖于先前关于完整性、完整性和系统“健康”的假设，基于对功能完整系统的特征的诊断。然而，生态社区的恢复一直由实践者领导，对于个别恢复项目如何在空间上相互联系以增强社区的复原力，收集的证据相对较少。这个联盟将领先的学术生态学家与一个公共部门组织和一个处于实际恢复活动前沿的慈善机构聚集在一起，通过自然实验从过去的活动中提取证据，并通过操纵测试弹性。我们打算测量生态系统从退化状态过渡到不同阶段的生物多样性、建筑和多功能，确定决定因素和复杂性的衡量标准，并寻找新特性的信号-特别是对扰动的弹性。我们选择了草地和林地，这是恢复计划的两个主要栖息地类型。此外，我们将探索加速系统重新整合的方法如何影响新出现的特性。综上所述，我们建议推进恢复科学，但将复杂性和弹性作为恢复项目的基本目标，而不是试图重新创建特定的目标生态系统。

There is a global biodiversity crisis driven by mounting pressures including land degradation and climate change. Within the UK, responses include the Government's 25 Year Environment Plan, which sets out a vision to secure a more biodiverse, connected and resilient landscape. The Natural Capital Committee has argued for the need to secure Net Environmental Gains, and this is a provision of the upcoming Environment Bill. A recent report from the UK Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology highlights the needs to secure our natural capital, not just to support biodiversity, but also ensure the provision of wider ecosystem services. Questions remain, however, as to how we achieve net environmental gain; what should go where? What does success look like? How long may it take to reassemble resilient communities that can reliably deliver ecosystem services? One widely adopted approach to securing net environmental gain is that of "ecological restoration". However, using specific natural and semi-natural ecosystems to define endpoints is increasingly contested, as target "pristine" states are hard to define, climate change is leading to a shifting baseline, and there is a need to restore ecosystems that are resilient to future pressures. We need a new paradigm for goal-seeking in ecological restoration which goes beyond reference systems, is agnostic as to prior assumptions of intactness, integrity and system "health", based on diagnostics of characteristics of functionally intact systems.There is an aspiration across the devolved administrations to deliver net environmental gain in biodiversity across all land uses. However, the restoration of ecological communities has been led by practitioners, with relatively little evidence gathered as to how individual restoration projects link together spatially to enhance the resilience of communities. This consortium brings together leading academic ecologists with a public sector organisation and a charity at the forefront of practical restoration activities, to extract the evidence from past activities through a natural experiment, and test resilience through manipulations.We intend to measure biodiversity, architecture and multifunctionality in ecosystems in different stages of transition from a degraded state, identify determinants and measures of complexity, and seek signals of emergent properties - especially resilience to perturbation. We have chosen grasslands and woodlands, being two major habitat types targeted for restoration programmes. Further to this we shall explore how approaches to accelerating re-integration of systems may affect emergent properties.In summary, we propose to move restoration science forward, but considering complexity and resilience as fundamental aims for restoration projects, rather than attempting to re-create specific target ecosystems.