The more detailed and specific the monitoring plan, the more we can learn about how well the projected outcomes are fulfilled in reality. The list of plants imported for such uses has nearly completely turned into the list of the continent's most vigorous weeds in the wild. Amur honeysuckle, autumn olive, multiflora rose, and many others were all introduced to quickly solve problems. The new problems they have created are much greater than the initial problems they were imported to solve. History has taught us that planting nonnatives in wild areas really amounts to planting weeds.
Monitoring is absolutely essential to ecological restoration work.
To see why, let's go back to the house analogy. Not so with ecological restoration. Each new project is in a real sense an experiment, another opportunity to learn what works and what doesn't-but only if we do followup monitoring, and not just for the short run, but over a period of years. Monitoring plans for ecological restoration projects will not follow a standardized format. Each project's restoration model provides the yardstick by which to measure its success.