Active involvement in Four Returns ecosystem restoration results in understanding stakeholders' motivations.
Once the students have observed this progression and entered data into their virtual laboratory notebooks, they remove the dam and observe as the ecosystem slowly returns to its original state.
Resilience is often used rather narrowly to refer to how something -- a person, community, city or ecosystem - returns to its original state after being pushed by an external shock -- a virus, flood, civil war or fire, for example.
Public lands are often tasked with ecosystem restoration that may include fire as a management tool in order to foster the return of ecosystem composition, structure, or function to a previous state.
Their reintroduction has been an unequivocal boon for the ecosystem — the return of a top predator to a system that is biologically unbalanced without it.
Yet I also sympathize with E. O. Wilson who, at the Aspen Environment Forum in June, argued that we should capture the pythons in the Everglades and allow the ecosystem to return to its admittedly idealized state, where foxes, rabbits, deer and a host of other vanishing life-forms may flourish.
In keeping with the hypothesis, the increase in groundwater supply led the restored ecosystem to return to a less advanced and self-sustainable successional stage, whereas vegetation monitoring in the reference channel did not show significant changes over this 17-year of period, supporting long-term studies to determine the effects of restoration on the biota.
In fire-prone ecosystems, the return of fire is inevitable, and legacies of past fires, or their absence, often dictate the characteristics of subsequent fires.
As previously mentioned, both environmental policy and public perception in the USA reflect widespread belief in a singular 'natural' equilibrium state, enshrined in Clementsian ecological theory as the climax to which ecosystems will return if disturbances are removed.
Individual and successive disturbances influence the capability of ecosystems to return to pre-disturbed states and can also facilitate alternative successional pathways, which can exacerbate turnover rates during periods of rapid climate transition (Turner 2010).
