Restoring Resilient Ecosystems (RestREco)

由于土地退化和气候变化等压力不断增加，全球生物多样性危机正在加剧。在联合王国，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，即确保一个更具生物多样性、连通性和复原力的景观。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。英国议会科学和技术办公室最近的一份报告强调了保护自然资本的必要性，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，问题仍然是我们如何实现净环境收益;什么应该去哪里？成功是什么样子的？需要多长时间才能重新组合能够可靠地提供生态系统服务的弹性社区？一个广泛采用的确保环境净收益的办法是“生态恢复”。然而，使用特定的自然和半自然生态系统来界定终点越来越受到争议，因为目标“原始”状态难以界定，气候变化正在导致基线发生变化，需要恢复能够承受未来压力的生态系统。我们需要一个新的模式，在生态恢复的目标寻求超越参考系统，是不可知论的完整性，完整性和系统的“健康”的前提假设，基于功能完整的系统的特征的诊断。有一个愿望，在所有的土地使用的生物多样性在整个下放管理提供净环境收益。然而，生态社区的恢复一直是由从业人员领导的，收集到的证据相对较少，说明个别恢复项目如何在空间上相互联系，以提高社区的复原力。该联盟汇集了领先的学术生态学家，公共部门组织和实际恢复活动前沿的慈善机构，通过自然实验从过去的活动中提取证据，并通过操作测试恢复力。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措施，并寻找新特性的信号--特别是对扰动的适应能力。我们选择了草地和林地作为恢复方案的两个主要生境类型。此外，我们还将探讨加速系统重新整合的方法如何影响紧急属性。总之，我们建议将恢复科学向前推进，但将复杂性和恢复力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.