Estimating the Size and Impact of the Ecological Restoration Economy.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: BenDor T
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4470920 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:Sustainability requires living within the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. In an attempt to measure the extent to which humanity satisfies this requirement, we use existing data to translate human demand on the environment into the area required for the production of food and other goods, together with the absorption of wastes. Our accounts indicate that human demand may well have exceeded the biosphere's regenerative capacity since the 1980s. According to this preliminary and exploratory assessment, humanity's load corresponded to 70% of the capacity of the global biosphere in 1961, and grew to 120% in 1999.
| S-EPMC123129 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Comparing ecological communities across environmental gradients can be challenging, especially when the number of different taxonomic groups in the communities is large. In this setting, community-level summaries called diversity indices are widely used to detect changes in the community ecology. However, estimation of diversity indices has received relatively little attention from the statistical community. The most common estimates of diversity are the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters of a multinomial model, even though the multinomial model implies strict assumptions about the sampling mechanism. In particular, the multinomial model prohibits ecological networks, where taxa positively and negatively co-occur. In this article, we leverage models from the compositional data literature that explicitly account for co-occurrence networks and use them to estimate diversity. Instead of proposing new diversity indices, we estimate popular diversity indices under these models. While the methodology is general, we illustrate the approach for the estimation of the Shannon, Simpson, Bray-Curtis, and Euclidean diversity indices. We contrast our method to multinomial, low-rank, and nonparametric methods for estimating diversity indices. Under simulation, we find that the greatest gains of the method are in strongly networked communities with many taxa. Therefore, to illustrate the method, we analyze the microbiome of seafloor basalts based on a 16S amplicon sequencing dataset with 1425 taxa and 12 communities.
| S-EPMC8759443 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Healthy pond ecosystems are critical for achieving several sustainable development goals (SDG) through numerous ecosystem services (e.g., flood control, nutrient retention, and carbon sequestration). However, the socio-economic and ecological value of ponds is often underestimated compared to the larger water bodies. Ponds are highly vulnerable to mounting land-use pressures (e.g., urban expansion, and agriculture intensification) and environmental changes, leading to degradation and loss of the pond ecosystem. The narrow utilitarian use-based conservation fails to recognize the multiple anthropogenic pressures and provides narrow solutions which are inefficient to regenerate the degraded pond ecosystem. In this paper, we holistically examined the legal challenges (policies) and key anthropogenic and environmental pressures responsible for pond degradation in India. The country is strongly dedicated to attaining SDG and circular economy (CE) through aquatic ecosystem conservation and restoration. Considerable efforts are required at the administration level to recognize the contribution of pond ecosystem services in attaining global environmental goals and targets. Worldwide restoration strategies were reviewed, and a framework for pond restoration and conservation was proposed, which includes policies and incentives, technologies such as environmental-DNA (e-DNA), life cycle assessment (LCA), and other ecohydrological measures. Nature-based solutions (NBS) offer a sustainable and cost-effective approach to restoring the pond's natural processes. Furthermore, linkage between the pond ecosystem and the CE was assessed to encourage a regenerative system for biodiversity conservation. This study informs the need for extensive actions and legislative reforms to restore and conserve the pond ecosystems.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13157-022-01624-9.
| S-EPMC9638415 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Is active restoration the best approach to achieve ecological restoration success (the return to a reference condition, that is, old-growth forest) when compared to natural regeneration in tropical forests? Our meta-analysis of 133 studies demonstrated that natural regeneration surpasses active restoration in achieving tropical forest restoration success for all three biodiversity groups (plants, birds, and invertebrates) and five measures of vegetation structure (cover, density, litter, biomass, and height) tested. Restoration success for biodiversity and vegetation structure was 34 to 56% and 19 to 56% higher in natural regeneration than in active restoration systems, respectively, after controlling for key biotic and abiotic factors (forest cover, precipitation, time elapsed since restoration started, and past disturbance). Biodiversity responses were based primarily on ecological metrics of abundance and species richness (74%), both of which take far less time to achieve restoration success than similarity and composition. This finding challenges the widely held notion that natural forest regeneration has limited conservation value and that active restoration should be the default ecological restoration strategy. The proposition that active restoration achieves greater restoration success than natural regeneration may have arisen because previous comparisons lacked controls for biotic and abiotic factors; we also did not find any difference between active restoration and natural regeneration outcomes for vegetation structure when we did not control for these factors. Future policy priorities should align the identified patterns of biophysical and ecological conditions where each or both restoration approaches are more successful, cost-effective, and compatible with socioeconomic incentives for tropical forest restoration.
| S-EPMC5677348 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The Everglades is one of the largest wetland ecosystems in the world covering almost 18,000 square miles from central Florida southward to Florida Bay. Over the 20th century, efforts to drain the Everglades for agriculture and development severely damaged the ecosystem so that today roughly 50% of the historic flow of water through the Everglades has been diverted elsewhere. In an attempt to restore the Everglades, the U.S. Congress authorized the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) in 2000, expected to cost over $16 billion and to take several decades to complete. We used the results from a stated preference choice experiment (SPCE) survey of Florida households to estimate the willingness to pay for several ecological attributes related to CERP performance indicators likely to be impacted by Everglades restoration. We also used a latent class model (LCM) to explore preference heterogeneity among respondents. On average, survey respondents were willing to pay for improvements in all of the attributes included in the survey, namely increased populations of wading birds, American alligators, endangered snail kites, and spotted seatrout, and reduced polluted discharges from Lake Okeechobee to the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers. Willingness to pay was highest for reduced polluted discharges from Lake Okeechobee.
| S-EPMC7302914 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Ecological restoration of mine tailings have impact on soil physiochemical properties and microbial communities. The surface soil has been a primary concern in the past decades, however it remains poorly understood about the adaptive response of microbial communities along the profile during ecological restoration of the tailings. In this study, microbial communities along a 60-cm profile were investigated in a mine tailing pond during ecological restoration of the bare waste tailings (BW) with two vegetated soils of Imperata cylindrica (IC) and Chrysopogon zizanioides (CZ) plants. Revegetation of both IC and CZ could retard soil degradation of mine tailing by stimulation of soil pH at 0-30 cm soils and altered the bacterial communities at 0-20 cm depths of the mine tailings. Significant differences existed in the relative abundance of the phyla Alphaproteobacteria, Deltaproteobacteria, Acidobacteria, Firmicutes and Nitrospira. Slight difference of bacterial communities were found at 30-60 cm depths of mine tailings. Abundance and activity analysis of nifH genes also explained the elevated soil nitrogen contents at the surface 0-20 cm of the vegetated soils. These results suggest that microbial succession occurred primarily at surface tailings and vegetation of pioneering plants might have promoted ecological restoration of mine tailings.
| S-EPMC4850430 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND:The species pool concept was formulated over the past several decades and has since played an important role in explaining multi-scale ecological patterns. Previous statistical methods were developed to identify species pools based on broad-scale species range maps or community similarity computed from data collected from many areas. No statistical method is available for estimating species pools for a single local community (sampling area size may be very small as ≤ 1 km2). In this study, based on limited local abundance information, we developed a simple method to estimate the area size and richness of a species pool for a local ecological community. The method involves two steps. In the first step, parameters from a truncated negative trinomial model characterizing the distributional aggregation of all species (i.e., non-random species distribution) in the local community were estimated. In the second step, we assume that the unseen species in the local community are most likely the rare species, only found in the remaining part of the species pool, and vice versa, if the remaining portion of the pool was surveyed and was contrasted with the sampled area. Therefore, we can estimate the area size of the pool, as long as an abundance threshold for defining rare species is given. Since the size of the pool is dependent on the rarity threshold, to unanimously determine the pool size, we developed an optimal method to delineate the rarity threshold based on the balance of the changing rates of species absence probabilities in the sampled and unsampled areas of the pool. RESULTS:For a 50 ha (0.5 km2) forest plot in the Barro Colorado Island of central Panama, our model predicted that the local, if not regional, species pool for the 0.5 km2 forest plot was nearly the entire island. Accordingly, tree species richness in this pool was estimated as around 360. When the sampling size was smaller, the upper bound of the 95% confidence interval could reach 418, which was very close to the flora record of tree richness for the island. A numerical test further demonstrated the power and reliability of the proposed method, as the true values of area size and species richness for the hypothetical species pool have been well covered by the 95% confidence intervals of the true values. CONCLUSIONS:Our method fills the knowledge gap on estimating species pools for a single local ecological assemblage with little information. The method is statistically robust and independent of sampling size, as proved by both empirical and numerical tests.
| S-EPMC5741966 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Ecological restoration often requires translocating plant material from distant sites. Importing suitable plant material is important for successful establishment and persistence. Yet, published guidelines for seed transfer are available for very few species. Accurately predicting how transferred plants will perform requires multiyear and multi-environment field trials and comprehensive follow-up work, and is therefore infeasible given the number of species used in restoration programs. Alternative methods to predict the outcomes of seed transfer are valuable for species without published guidelines. In this study, we analyzed the genetic structure of an important shrub used in ecological restoration in the Southern Rocky Mountains called alder-leaf mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus montanus). We sequenced DNA from 1,440 plants in 48 populations across a broad geographic range. We found that genetic heterogeneity among populations reflected the complex climate and topography across which the species is distributed. We identified temperature and precipitation variables that were useful predictors of genetic differentiation and can be used to generate seed transfer recommendations. These results will be valuable for defining management and restoration practices for mountain mahogany.
| S-EPMC7863393 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Hypotheses that relate body size to energy use are of particular interest in community ecology and macroecology because of their potential to facilitate quantitative predictions about species interactions and to clarify complex ecological patterns. One prominent size-energy hypothesis, the energetic equivalence hypothesis, proposes that energy use from shared, limiting resources by populations or size classes of foragers will be independent of body size. Alternative hypotheses propose that energy use will increase with body size, decrease with body size, or peak at an intermediate body size. Despite extensive study, however, size-energy hypotheses remain controversial, due to a lack of directly-measured data on energy use, a tendency to confound distinct scaling relationships, and insufficient attention to the ecological contexts in which predicted relationships are likely to occur. Our goal, therefore, was to directly evaluate size-energy hypotheses while clarifying how results would differ with alternate methods and assumptions. We comprehensively tested size-energy hypotheses in a vertebrate frugivore guild in a tropical forest in Madagascar. Our test of size-energy hypotheses, which is the first to examine energy intake directly, was consistent with the energetic equivalence hypothesis. This finding corresponds with predictions of metabolic theory and models of energy distribution in ecological communities, which imply that body size does not confer an advantage in competition for energy among populations or size classes of foragers. This result was robust to different assumptions about energy regulation. Our results from direct energy measurement, however, contrasted with those obtained with conventional methods of indirect inference from size-density relationships, suggesting that size-density relationships do not provide an appropriate proxy for size-energy relationships as has commonly been assumed. Our research also provides insights into mechanisms underlying local size-energy relationships and has important implications for predicting species interactions and for understanding the structure and dynamics of ecological communities.
| S-EPMC3737256 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Cooperation becomes more difficult as a group becomes larger, but it is unclear where it will break down. Here, we study group size within well-functioning social-ecological systems. We consider centuries-old evidence from hundreds of communities in the Alps that harvested common property resources. Results show that the average group size remained remarkably stable over about six centuries, in contrast to a general increase in the regional population. The population more than doubled, but although single groups experienced fluctuations over time, the average group size remained stable. Ecological factors, such as managing forest instead of pasture land, played a minor role in determining group size. The evidence instead indicates that factors related to social interactions had a significant role in determining group size. We discuss possible interpretations of the findings based on constraints in individual cognition and obstacles in collective decision making.
| S-EPMC5856516 | biostudies-literature