Terrestrial Insect Communities and the Restoration of an Industrially Perturbed Landscape: Assessing Success and Surrogacy

Restoration has been acknowledged to be a major pathway by which humans can repair damaged ecosystems. Most of the work to date on terrestrial systems has focused on restoring plant communities, with an assumption that the conditions that lead to more diverse plant communities will also lead to a restoration of insect communities. This, however, has not been proven to be true. Here, we examine the recovery of terrestrial insect communities in naturally recovering and restored sites in response to severe historic pollution in the region of Sudbury, Ontario. We find that the insect communities have not recovered to the same degree as the plant communities. Furthermore, we present directions on how cross-taxa surrogacy can be useful to further aid the use of insects as indicators of restoration success.