The Agricultural Stream Syndrome (AgSS): Re-igniting healthy resilience through restoration

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Human impacts on the Earth's ecosystems are now so pervasive that the UN has declared 2021-2030 the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, building on the growing global acceptance that degraded ecosystems are not fully recovering and human-driven climate change has placed us in a `code red' state of emergency. Given that streams and river ecosystems serve as hotspots of biodiversity and human impacts, their condition is representative of their surrounding landscapes. As such, streams serve as model systems explore mechanisms behind restoration delay and success. Theoretically, the goal of restoration is to restore positive resistance and resilience mechanisms such that desired properties are self-perpetuating without ongoing interventions. However, recovery continues to show delays. My research has consistently shown that degraded streams remain resilient due to mismatched restoration actions that keep them in an unhealthy state. Taking a diverse and inclusive approach, progress towards a new framework - the Agricultural Stream Syndrome - will bring together the biotic and abiotic attributes of degradation to accelerate efforts to ensure full ecosystem recovery. To pivot the focus of restoration on accelerated ecosystem recovery, the long-term vision for this program is to develop a new paradigm for addressing degraded - and restoring - agricultural streams, herein called the Agricultural Stream Syndrome. This program will engage local and Indigenous knowledge systems alongside diverse research methodologies that include field surveys to capture riparian-instream and ecosystem function relationships, data syntheses to extract and confer trait-based community properties and assess the global restoration literature, and, to implement a space-for-time study approach in the field which will engage spatially distinct sites as proxies for long-term ecological time series. We will use this program as a step towards longer-term, larger scale stream restoration experiments on the ground, in real world contexts. In the coming five years, I will empower and train HQP to test the hypothesis that negative resistance and resilience mechanisms (sensu Barrett et al. 2021) underpin delayed ecosystem recovery. We will conduct field surveys on riparian plants and in-stream benthic macroinvertebrates to quantify cross-system relationships, apply functional trait data to confer these relationships and generate hypotheses on what restoration action(s) have the potential to ignite and sustain desired interactions. Working almost entirely on agricultural landscapes in the region, this program necessitates an equitable, diverse and inclusive approach to the research, engaging Settler and Indigenous knowledge systems, local communities, practitioners, government and industry all as research partners to achieve the short-term objectives and work towards the long-term vision.