Restoration Ecology Approaches for Enhancing Native Species Recovery in Fragmented Wildlife Habitats

Abstract

Fragmented habitats remain among the major causes of species decline, causing isolation and disruption of biological interactions in the habitats. Ecological restoration is slowly shifting from mere revegetation to landscape-scale approaches aimed at restoring habitat connectivity and the disrupted ecosystem functions in fragmented habitats. This paper reviews scientific literature on the efficacy of the approaches focusing on restoration corridors, functional connectivity restoration, and landscape-scale approaches to ecological restoration. Long-term experimental evidence shows that habitat restoration corridors result in continuous increase in the native plant diversity without plateauing over the decades due to increased colonization and reduced extinction rates in connected patches. Habitat corridors also restore animal-driven ecosystem functions such as pollination which are not possible in isolated patches, and the evaluation of restoration corridors has confirmed reconnection of isolated animal species, including mammals and birds. In terms of larger-scale studies, global meta-analysis has shown that habitat restoration results are greatly dependent on the time passed since disturbance, previous disturbance level and context of the landscape, and they have been found to be more effective where fragmentation and disturbance level is low.