REVITALIZATION
Natural
areas have native plants and animals, a community, whose populations are
dynamic or changing. It has always been so, but in the last couple hundred
years the economic activities of humans are dramatically affecting the population
dynamics in many places. Anthropogenic causes include the spreading non-native
species, creating legal boundaries, changing the patterns of natural processes,
and others.
ECOLOGICAL
RESTORATION attempts to restore some aspect of ecological function to a place,
including highly altered places. Revitalization is that small subset of
ecological restoration that attempts to maintain a community in its natural
dynamic, free of non-native species and regulating native species abundance to
compensate for anthropogenic impacts.
REVITALIZATION starts with the premise that human economic activities are negatively impacting natural communities. It focuses on reversing the alterations of processes that have resulted from those activities; namely fire suppression, drainage and dams, and removal of exotic species.
Revitalization measures success by the increase in the ‘naturalness’ of the native community. Naturalness is difficult to describe and impossible to measure other than subjectively, but one can develop a feel for it (it is an art). Naturalness recognizes that native species abundance can go beyond normal limits. A revitalizor tries to develop a sense of nature that enables judgment about whether increasing the abundance of, say a bee species, is getting the system closer to natural or is disrupting the other species of the community. Clearly this is site specific knowledge that does not lead to quick generalizations.
Dennis Nyberg
28 February 2007