Long-Term Ecological Evaluation of Biodiversity Changes Following Habitat Restoration Initiatives in Degraded Ecosystems
Keywords:
Biodiversity conservation, Habitat restoration, Ecological monitoring, Degraded ecosystems, Species diversity, Ecosystem recovery, Long-term ecological assessment, Restoration ecology, Environmental sustainability, Ecological resilience.Abstract
Ecological restoration has emerged as a key approach to combat the problem of biodiversity decline in ecosystems around the globe. Nevertheless, the extent to which the restoration results in biological communities being similar to those observed in reference, undamaged ecosystems is contentious. In this paper, I will provide a comprehensive overview of the literature, focusing on studies based on long-term (>30 years), multi-decadal assessments and meta-analysis covering forests, wetlands, and grasslands to examine how biodiversity changes post-restoration and whether the effect is related to the timing of the assessment, ecosystem type, and restoration method used. Restoration leads to increases in species richness and abundance in relation to degraded ecosystems in all types of ecosystems considered. On average, the effect is equal to 15-84% in forests and similarly high in wetlands. However, the process of converging to reference levels is gradual, irregular for different groups of species and, in some cases, not complete even after one hundred years.