Ecological restoration is quickly becoming a major approach to how humans interact with the natural world. Some view restoration as another land management technique on par with conservation and preservation. Others view it as a way to make reparations for our misdeeds and to reincorporate humans into the natural world. Ideas regarding restoration from key academics and restorationists are evaluated here. Their views have set the stage for the contemporary paradigm. Values that may be attributed to restoration and received from it are evaluated. I discuss my own reservations regarding potential problems with the product and practice of restoration. What is at stake regarding the involvement of people in restoration is examined, focusing on the different impacts volunteers and paid workers have on the value of the practice and outcome of the product.

Three wetland restoration methods: seeding, seeding + hay mulch, and seeding + hay mulch + vegetation plugs were compared via the plant community within a formerly cropped wetland in southeastern North Dakota. Arrangement of plugs were also compared to assess the success of native species establishment. Mean relative cover for native species and introduced species were recorded and analyzed to compare the restoration methods and plug arrangement. Three herbicide treatments were studied on upland prairie sites with and without prescribed burning to test effects on leafy spurge (Euphorbia esula) control and seeded native establishment. There is no difference native species richness between the restoration methods six years post restoration, and no difference in plant cover in the different arrangement of plugs. Quinclorac significantly reduced leafy spurge cover; however, glyphosate treatments had higher cover of seeded native species.

Forest disturbance occurs on a wide gradient of selectiveness and creates new growth opportunities for adapted species. Across the spectrum of disturbance, anthropogenic disturbance influences community assembly in the Midwest more than other mechanisms but is its role in shaping and maintaining ecosystems is inadequately considered in most discussions on the historic range of variability (HRV). Forest resiliency is threatened by unprecedented agents of ecosystem change such as invasive species and reduced regeneration potential of native species. Historic anthropogenic disturbance largely resulted in forest conditions which commonly contained high value attributes like heterogeneity across habitat types and landscape diversity, yet also produced forests of undesirable traits due to high grading for timber and overgrazing by domesticated stock. In order to maintain historical representative forests and improve the degraded forests, active forest management is necessary to continue historic disturbance patterns and combat new threats. Forest transition theory is used here to describe the impacts of human settlement and development activities on forest ecosystems across the Middle Mississippi River Valley. To date, researchers have identified the need for information related to changes of forest attributes such as species composition and stand structure, improved descriptions of short- and medium-term dynamics within the context of the long-term transition, and the integration of biophysical drivers of forest change through time. In Midwestern U.S.A., forest dynamics were influenced by frequent, low intensity disturbance events that mediate forest composition and stand structure by selecting for disturbance regimes that create oak woodland and interspersed prairies and meadows. The onset of Euro-American settlement was accompanied by detailed land-use records with information related to forest attributes, agricultural activities, and parcel ownership patterns. We aggregated multiple sources of historic forest conditions into a geodatabase in order to document changes over the past 200 years in Elsah Township, Illinois, where the pre-settlement (1820) forest, once dominated by oak and hickory species, has largely shifted to a maple dominated system with a declining oak-hickory component, heavily influenced by an invasive shrub species, bush honeysuckle. Using on ordinary kriging interpolation, forest density was estimated at 8.7 stems per acre on average with a mean basal area of 14.6 square feet per acre prior to settlement. Conservation practices of the early 1900s, including fire suppression and erosion control resulted in changes to forest structure with density increases to 127 trees per acre with a basal area of 175.8 square feet per acre. The high degree of topographic variability near the Mississippi River influenced forest cover changes as slopes with low angles were the first to be converted from forest cover to other land uses (circa 1850). Forest re-initiation occurred in areas with steeper slope due to a lack of human activities. Forest cover declined to the lowest point in 1927 and has been rebounding steadily throughout this century. Of the original 15,252 forested acres, 11.6% remained covered throughout the past 200 years and coincided with slopes with an average of 39.1 degrees. These data can provide a spatially explicit and historically accurate tool to guide land management decisions including restoration treatment, disturbance regime management, and land use preservation activities in similarly heterogeneous environments. Forest communities along the bluffs of the Mississippi River differ in species composition and stand structure associated with specific topographic positions of floodplain, transition talus slope, bluff top, and upland. In order to assess current stand characteristics and ecosystem trajectory, we measured all woody stems in 316 fixed radius plots (79 plots per topographic position) with a plot area of 25 m2. Alpha (defined as within system diversity) and Beta (defined as between system diversity) diversity and diameter distributions were determined for seedling, shrub layer, and overstory stems. Stem density increased from 21.4 stems ha-1 in 1820 to 613 stems ha-1 in 1936 followed by reduction to 314 stems ha-1 in 2017. Average stand diameter decreased from 40.9 cm in 1820 to 25.3 cm in 2017 (for upland stems greater than 7.5 cm) while basal area increased from 3.3 m2 ha-1 in 1820 to 40.4 m2 ha-1 in 2017. Alpha diversity was highest in the upland overstory and in the river island shrub layer. Beta diversity in the overstory was highest (0.67) between the bluff and the upland while lowest (0.08) between the bluff and the river island. Importantly, mesophytic species are no longer restricted to watercourses and valleys as reported in historical accounts and confirmed by the spatial analysis of original witness tree records. Currently, bush honeysuckle, an invasive species, dominates the shrub layer on most non-hydric sites of the talus slope, upland, and particularly across the bluff top where it is an indicator. Across all forest sites in the study, we found evidence of a community shift to less diversity and more mesophytic species over the past 80 years. Hill prairie vegetation on the limestone bluffs of the central Mississippi River Valley represents a significant portion of the remaining prairie, savanna, and woodland systems of the Midwest and should be appropriately managed with prescribed fire and woody stem reduction efforts. We examined the structure, composition, and temporal community patterns of the forest-prairie gradient by employing hierarchical cluster analysis and non-metric multi-dimensional scaling in combination with indicator species analysis and dendrochronological methods. Results suggest that four general community types exist across the forest-prairie gradient: Group 1 consists of the woodland community structure with significant indicator values for the density of Juniperus virginiana (indicator value 58.4, p = 0.0002), Carya glabra (45, 0.0022), Quercus stellata (23.7, 0.0424), and Lonicera maackii (74.2, 0.0002) and a high basal area (BA) of J. virgniana (21.4, 0.0276) and L. maackii (47.9, 0.0054). The first year of L. maackii presence was 1964 with the primary wave of invasion beginning around 1990. Group 2 contains bare soil coverage in the subplot (40.4, 0.0002) as the one indicator at a significant level. The species with the highest BA in Group 2 include Acer saccharum (9.08 m2 ha-1), Q. velutina (5.89 m2 ha-1), and Q. muehlenbergii (5.32 m2 ha-1). Group 3 typifies the hill prairie community with the sole indicator of grass coverage in the subplots (39.7, 0.0196). Group 4 represents the stage of forest development following the cessation of disturbance events and the trajectory advancing towards a mesophytic forest and contains 14 significant indicators.

A robust ecosystem requires a functionally heterogeneous community of organisms with a wide range of traits that permits broad resource partitioning. Understanding community diversity patterns can help investigate drivers of community assembly and how different metrics reflect the success of restoration in grassland or weed control in cropland. The objectives of my study were to identify assembly drivers influencing community taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity. The first study examined the effect of different ecotypes of dominant species on grassland community diversity along a spatial aridity gradient during restoration. This study showed that ecotype significantly affected species richness and shaped taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity. Accordingly, restorations should consider ecotypic variation as a critical biological filter to community assembly in grassland ecosystems. Given the community response across the tallgrass prairie, restoration practitioners should draw attention to regional sources of dominant species because ideal ecotypic sources can affect species richness and even sustain the phylogenetic and functional patterns. The restoration efficacy of existing ecosystems should be evaluated to large-scale diversity patterns to detect gaps and limitations that will reveal which diversity components to highlight for further restoration investment. The second study investigated temporal variations in diversity metrics among dominant species ecotypes and a drought treatment on the importance of external and internal filters in shaping the assembly of grassland communities. In this study, species richness decreased significantly during the early stages of restoration while phylogenetic and functional diversity was maintained over eight years. I also found no significant effect of experimental drought treatment on community biodiversity. Moreover, ecotypic variation as an internal filter played a key role in grassland assembly but the external filter was less strong because of high trait overlap among species within a community. In general, this study highlighted the consequence of integrating both interspecific and intraspecific trait variabilities and the value of concentrating on functional traits to comprehend better how trait variability is coupled with species coexistence. Future investigations are necessary to examine the distinctive origins of variability in plant traits and how they contribute to grassland community assembly. The third study focused on whether weed management tactics such as a glyphosate-resistant (GR) cropping system were beneficial to control weed diversity in the soil seedbank of the agroecosystem. Both phylogenetic and functional diversity of the soil seedbank was relatively stable with different GR cropping systems across six years. The neutral assembly of the soil seedbank may imply that the belowground weed community could be restrained by stochastic mechanisms, such as dispersal and demographic stochasticity of seeds, during agricultural activities. Therefore, I recommend integrated weed management with a sustainable perspective to fight against the evolutionary feedback due to weed herbicide resistance. While the GR cropping system still seems beneficial, future weed control cannot overlook the extensive impact of GR systems on biodiversity variations, the shifts in weed composition, and the resistance evolution of weed species to herbicides in the agroecosystem.

This paper investigates Fletcher Steele’s ideas about nature, and the fitness of gardens, in order to guide and support a reinvigoration of Naumkeag. Its aim is to highlight the protection of ecological resources while preserving aesthetic and historic integrity. This topic is particularly timely as The Trustees of Reservations are in the process of completing an extensive and unprecedented restoration plan, which will be carried out over the next five years. The Trustees have a long history of historic preservation and ecological conservation. This paper explores how these two aspects of their work can be integrated at Naumkeag, with particular attention to the undesigned portions of the site, such as the grasslands’ fen community. It illuminates how Steele’s original conception of the site, his environmental ethic, and his inspired design, can inform the adoption of original sustainable practices in the gardens, guide sensitive plant replacements, and enhance the visitor’s experience and knowledge.

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