Disturbance and diversity at two spatial scales

The spatial scale of disturbance is a factor potentially influencing the relationship between disturbance and diversity. There has been discussion on whether disturbances that affect local communities and create a mosaic of patches in different successional stages have the same effect on diversity as regional disturbances that affect the whole landscape. In a microcosm experiment with metacommunities of aquatic protists, we compared the effect of local and regional disturbances on the disturbance–diversity relationship. Local disturbances destroyed entire local communities of the metacommunity and required reimmigration from neighboring communities, while regional disturbances affected the whole metacommunity but left part of each local community intact. Both disturbance types led to a negative relationship between disturbance intensity and Shannon diversity. With strong local disturbance, this decrease in diversity was due to species loss, while strong regional disturbance had no effect on species richness but reduced the evenness of the community. Growth rate appeared to be the most important trait for survival after strong local disturbance and dominance after strong regional disturbance. The pattern of the disturbance–diversity relationship was similar for both local and regional diversity. Although local disturbances at least temporally increased beta diversity by creating a mosaic of differently disturbed patches, this high dissimilarity did not result in regional diversity being increased relative to local diversity. The disturbance–diversity relationship was negative for both scales of diversity. The flat competitive hierarchy and absence of a trade-off between competition and colonization ability are a likely explanation for this pattern

Vegetative Ecological Characteristics of Restored Reed (Phragmites australis) Wetlands in the Yellow River Delta, China

In this study, we compared ecological characteristics of wetland vegetation in a series of restoration projects that were carried out in the wetlands of Yellow River Delta. The investigated characteristics include plant composition structure, species diversity and community similarity in three kinds of Phragmites australis wetlands, i.e. restored P. australis wetlands (R1, R2, R3 and R4: restored in 2002, 2005, 2007 and 2009, respectively), natural P. australis wetland (N) and degraded P. australis wetland (D) to assess the process of wetlands restoration. The coverage of the R1 was 99%, which was similar to natural wetland. Among all studied wetlands, the highest and lowest stem density was observed in R1 and R2, respectively, Plant height and stem diameter show the same trend as N > R2 > R1 > R3 > D > R4. Species diversity of restored P. australis wetlands became closed to natural wetland. Both species richness and Shannon–Wiener index had similar tendency: increased first and then decreased with restored time. The highest species richness and species diversity were observed in R2, while the lowest values of those parameters were found in natural P. australis wetland. Similarity indexes between restored wetlands and natural wetland increased with the restoration time, but they were still less than 50%. The results indicate that the vegetation of P. australis wetlands has experienced a great improvement after several years’ restoration, and it is feasible to restored degraded P. australis wetlands by pouring fresh water into those wetlands in the Yellow River Delta. However, it is notable that costal degraded P. australis wetland in this region may take years to decades to reach the status of natural wetland

Precision restoration: a necessary approach to foster forest recovery in the 21st century

We thank S. Tabik, E. Guirado, and Garnata Drone SL for fruitful debates about the application of remote sensing and artificial intelligence in restoration. E. McKeown looked over the English version of the manuscript. Original drawings were made by J. D. Guerrero. This work was supported by projects RESISTE (P18-RT-1927) from the Consejeria de Economia, Conocimiento, y Universidad from the Junta de Andalucia, and AVA201601.19 (NUTERA-DE I), DETECTOR (A-RNM-256-UGR18), and AVA2019.004 (NUTERA-DE II), cofinanced (80%) by the FEDER Program. F.M.-R. acknowledges the support of the Agreement 4580 between OTRI-UGR and the city council of La Zubia. We thank an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments that improved the manuscript.Forest restoration is currently a primary objective in environmental management policies at a global scale, to the extent that impressive initiatives and commitments have been launched to plant billions of trees. However, resources are limited and the success of any restoration effort should be maximized. Thus, restoration programs should seek to guarantee that what is planted today will become an adult tree in the future, a simple fact that, however, usually receives little attention. Here, we advocate for the need to focus restoration efforts on an individual plant level to increase establishment success while reducing negative side effects by using an approach that we term “precision forest restoration” (PFR). The objective of PFR will be to ensure that planted seedlings or sowed seeds will become adult trees with the appropriate landscape configuration to create functional and self-regulating forest ecosystems while reducing the negative impacts of traditional massive reforestation actions. PFR can take advantage of ecological knowledge together with technologies and methodologies from the landscape scale to the individual- plant scale, and from the more traditional, low-tech approaches to the latest high-tech ones. PFR may be more expensive at the level of individual plants, but will be more cost-effective in the long term if it allows for the creation of resilient forests able to providemultiple ecosystemservices. PFR was not feasible a few years ago due to the high cost and low precision of the available technologies, but it is currently an alternative that might reformulate a wide spectrum of ecosystem restoration activities.Junta de Andalucia P18-RT-1927European Commission AVA201601.19 A-RNM-256-UGR18 AVA2019.004OTRI-UGR 4580city council of La Zubia 458