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Ecological Restoration

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Regreening the Bare Hills

Part of the book series: World Forests ((WFSE,volume 8))

Abstract

Ecological Restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged or destroyed (SER 2004). Different practitioners interpret this in various ways. Some think it necessitates re-establishing the original ecosystem or trying to replicate the communities present in some supposed reference ecosystem. Others take a rather more pragmatic approach and seek to restore as many of the original species as possible and develop a functionally effective and self-sustaining system even if it is, ultimately, one with a slightly different composition than the original ecosystem. In practice, there is probably little difference between these approaches. Both rely on re-establishing native species representative of the site and both recognise that the process will take many years to reach maturity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Mined Land Rehabilitation, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 4072, Australia

    David Lamb

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  1. David Lamb
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Correspondence to David Lamb .

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Lamb, D. (2011). Ecological Restoration. In: Regreening the Bare Hills. World Forests, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9870-2_8

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