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，应对措施包括政府的“25年环境计划”，该计划提出了一个愿景，以确保一个更加生物多样性，联系和弹性的景观。自然资本委员会认为有必要确保净环境收益，这是即将出台的环境法案的一项规定。英国议会科技办公室（Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology）最近的一份报告强调，需要保护我们的自然资本，不仅要支持生物多样性，还要确保提供更广泛的生态系统服务。然而，问题仍然存在，我们如何实现净环境收益；什么应该放在哪里？成功是什么样子的？重新组建能够可靠地提供生态系统服务的有弹性的社区需要多长时间？确保净环境收益的一个广泛采用的方法是“生态恢复”。然而，使用特定的自然和半自然生态系统来定义端点的争议越来越大，因为目标“原始”状态很难定义，气候变化正在导致基线的变化，需要恢复能够适应未来压力的生态系统。我们需要一个新的范式来寻求生态恢复的目标，它超越了参考系统，对先前的完整性、完整性和系统“健康”的假设是不可知的，基于对功能完整系统特征的诊断。各地方政府都有一个愿望，即在所有土地利用中实现生物多样性的净环境收益。然而，生态群落的恢复一直是由实践者主导的，关于单个恢复项目如何在空间上联系在一起以增强群落的恢复力，收集到的证据相对较少。该联盟将领先的学术生态学家与公共部门组织和慈善机构聚集在实际恢复活动的最前沿，通过自然实验从过去的活动中提取证据，并通过操纵来测试恢复力。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、结构和多功能性，确定复杂性的决定因素和衡量标准，并寻求突现特性的信号——特别是对扰动的恢复能力。我们选择了草地和林地，这是恢复计划的两种主要栖息地类型。在此基础上，我们将进一步探讨加速系统重新整合的方法如何影响涌现特性。总之，我们建议将恢复科学向前推进，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.