CONSERVATION
RESTORATION &
REVITALIZATION

Conservation is moving from preservation toward active restoration of ecological function. Species in natural communities are impacted by a wide variety of human activities.

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Reading Assignment

• Chapter 55 focuses on a ‘preservation’ point of view, but introduces restoration.

• ‘Ecological Restoration’ has become a business activity. Money for restoration is generated from wetland protection laws as well as local government and individuals.

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Knowledge vs. Existence

• Species exist independent of humans naming them and describing them.

• A viewpoint common among ecologists that species can only be ‘saved’ if people plan for their existence.

• Species did not come into being because of people. How will attaching a name to a specimen contribute to a species persistence?

Speaker Notes:

There are a number of ways a name makes a difference.

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Conservation’s Assumption

• The ‘default’ assumption of conservation is that excluding human activity by labeling land as a ‘preserve’ is necessary and sufficient to maintain the assemblage of native species.

• Assemblages of species are dynamic and sensitive to environmental change, so preservation has not worked well.

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Things that affect Biodiversity

• Overexploitation (hunting, fishing, trade)

• Introduced species (competition, displacement)

• Pollution (negative effects on growth)

• Global warming (an altered environment)

• Habitat destruction (use of land for economics)

• Habitat fragmentation (spatial arrangement)

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Habitat Fragmentation

• If the surrounding matrix is hostile, the species in a small preserve are more impacted by their outside than those in a larger preserve.

• This is known as fragmentation effect.

• Fragmentation should vary according to the normal movement patterns of a species.

Speaker Notes:

Scale: different organisms function at different scales of distances.

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Ecological Restoration

• Ecological Restoration attempts to restore attributes of ecological function/services.

• Perhaps the earliest restoration of ecological services was wastewater treatment.

• Wastewater treatment concentrates the oxidation of waste to reduce the BOD of the water entering the river, lake or ocean.

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Other Early Ecological Restoration

• Promotion of services and knowledge to reduce soil erosion.

• Development of stocking programs for fish and game.

• Regulations concerning restoration of condition of land after strip mining.

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Restoring Function

• To restore a structure (e.g., a painting or a house) we fix or rebuild parts.

• To restore ecological function:

  • It is desirable we understand function,

  • It is desirable we have the necessary parts,

  • It is desirable we understand causes of change in function.

• As a goal directed activity, ecological restoration is an engineering activity.

Speaker Notes:

Science has problems dealing with goals and progress, but that is the natural mode of engineering.

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Pollution Regulation

• Individuals and corporations may produce things that reduce ecological function.

• When the negative impact of those products is understood, individuals may lobby for regulations (laws) to minimize future impacts.

• For many years people dumped waste as a way to get it away from where it was generated.

• Regulations protect the population from harmful chemicals by controlling disposal and making disposal safer.

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Examples of Anthropogenic Impacts

• Changes in climate are now receiving most attention, but …

• Major changes in the environment have occurred in last hundred years:

  • Strip mining

  • Impervious surface growth (roads & roofs)

  • Farmland loss to residences and commerce

  • New chemical compounds

  • Wetland loss through drainage

• The consequences of changes may not be manifest until many years after the event.

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Revegetation of Mines

• The development of vegetation on the overburden can be greatly accelerated in various ways.

• Revegetation of strip mines is now a requirement in all jurisdictions.

• Understanding how to do that effectively is part of restoration.

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Impervious surface growth

• Impervious-to-rain surfaces: primarily parking lots, roads, and roofs,

  • Cover more than 35% of the area of urban areas

  • Parking lots and roads have all been developed in the last 100 years.

• Impervious surfaces increase flooding and reduce the amount of water entering the soil.

Speaker Notes:

In the future I predict a law ‘no net gain of road surface’. To build a new road you have to tear up an old, presumably lightly used one.

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Farmland loss

• Farms not only produced the food we need, they also do better at some ecological functions than residential/urban areas. (Farms also create fertilizer problems.)

• Once land is developed, it can’t be returned to effectively grow food in the future (without large amounts of energy input or waiting a long time).

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Wetlands

• Wetlands are very important to natural communities – ‘hotspot’ of diversity

• Currently policy of US government is ‘no net loss’ of wetlands.

• Development of land with wetlands requires payment of $ to build wetlands off site (or a plan to retain wetland on site).

• $ have generated a mitigation industry.

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Restoration of species

• Many animal species have been restored to areas from which they had been extirpated.

  • Deer in Cook and other counties of NE Illinois.

  • Turkey in many parts of Illinois.

  • Peregrine falcon in Chicago.

• Some animal species have been lost, others are just “hanging on”

  • Prairie chicken is ‘hanging on’ in Illinois.

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Endangered and Threatened Species

• Endangered Species Act passed in 1973.

• US Fish and Wildlife Service has responsibility for designating species as Endangered or Threatened.

• Endangered means in imminent danger of going extinct.

• Threatened means likely to become endangered.

• Applies to taxa lower than species.

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Basis for Listing

• How is a species determined to be endangered or threatened?

  • Small population size.

  • Found in only a few places.

  • >30% decline in the last 10 years or 3 generations.

• The E&T list dominated by taxa which always had a limited distribution often associated with special habitat, such as caves.

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IUCN

• The World Conservation Union

• Maintains a “Red list” of the extinction status of many animal taxa (all vertebrates plus others)

• Species Survival Commission

  • Specialist Groups within SSC, e.g., the shark group

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Illinois Endangered and Threatened Species Protection Board

• Illinois maintains a list of E & T species

• The list is dynamic.

  • Additions

    • I was involved in the successful effort to add Franklin’s Ground Squirrel.

  • Removals

    • River otter, slender wheat grass, and many others

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RECONSTRUCTION

• One restoration activity attempts to build native communities on land that was farmed.

• These efforts have focused on prairies.

• They also focus on plant communities.

• Prairie reconstructions tend to have much more grass and taller plants than original prairie.

• Most prairie species are not present in most reconstructions.

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REVITALIZATION

• Preservation of land is not sufficient to maintain natural communities.

  • Biological pollution = invasive species.

  • Altered hydrology, especially roads.

  • Altered natural event regimes (fire, floods).

• Actions by naturalists can counteract or ameliorate the negative impacts on natural communities generated by human activity.

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VOCABULARY

• Fragmentation

• Revegetation

• Reconstruction

• Revitalization

• Extirpated

• Restoration

• Endangered

• Threatened

• IUCN

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