Journal
RESTORATION ECOLOGY
Volume 21, Issue 3, Pages 297-304Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/rec.12012
Keywords
ecosystem function; ecosystem stability; goal setting; landscape effects; SER Primer; species composition
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Funding
- Australian Research Council via an Australian Laureate Fellowship
- ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions
- National Environmental Research Program Environmental Decisions Research Hub
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Restoration is a young and swiftly developing field. It has been almost a decade since the inception of one of the field's foundational documentsthe Society for Ecological Restoration International Primer on Ecological Restoration (Primer). Through a series of organized discussions, we assessed the Primer for its currency and relevance in the modern field of ecological restoration. We focused our assessment on the section entitled The Nine Attributes of a Restored Ecosystem and grouped each of the attributes into one of four categories: species composition, ecosystem function, ecosystem stability, and landscape context. We found that in the decade since the document's inception, the concepts, methods, goals, and thinking of ecological restoration have shifted significantly. We discuss each of the four categories in this light with the aim of offering comments and suggestions on options for updating the Primer. We also include a fifth category that we believe is increasingly acknowledged in ecological restoration: the human element. The Primer is an important document guiding the practice of restoration. We hope that this critical assessment contributes to its ongoing development and relevance and more generally to the development of restoration ecology, particularly in our current era of rapid environmental change.
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