The restoration of degraded ecosystems and restoration ecology

The ideas of restoring biotic communities originated 100 years ago from studies of degraded ecosystems and natural resource management practices. Restoration ecology has been established as a discipline since 1980s and is broadly defined as the study of restoring and managing ecological integrity. Ecological integrity includes biodiversity, ecological pattern and process, regional and historical context, and social practices for sustainability. Restoration ecology focuses on ecosystems that are driven away from their “normal” states by natural or anthropogenic disturbances. The objective of ecological restoration is to reconstruct the structure, function, dynamics and services, and its long-term goal is to achieve ecological sustainability through restoration and protection measures. Because of the complexity of ecological processes, the direction and time required for restoration of a particular ecosystem is hardly deterministic. The general process of ecological restoration, however, may be explained by the critical threshold theory, and state and transition model from successional perspective. Several problems have been pointed out in this article on forest restoration in China: a great deal of the established artificial forests with mono-species result in lacking of biodiversity and stableness; non-native species have been widely imported and planted; features required by healthy ecosystem such as heterogeneity are ignored; the mutual biotic interaction among different species are ignored; rare and endangered species of climax are seldom been considered in forestation; ecological function of vegetation is neglected in town virescence and landscape. In addition, the method of restoration ecology and the criteria of successful restoration as well as the future developments in the field of restoration ecology have been introduced in this review. Theories and methodologies of restoration ecology are still at their early stage and takes time to develop. Restoration ecology is focusing on the integration of natural restoration and social humanities. Restoration ecology not only defines the obstacle of restoration but also overcomes that obstacle. Due to the complexity and dynamics of ecosystem, it is wise to emphasize on adaptability restoration according to various locations and objectives instead of trying to establish some simple expected principals.