Ongoing Saga Of Literature Review-Paper #1-The Inspiration
By: Wendy Owens Rios
Tags: Ecosystem Complexity, Restoration, Ecology, Literature Review, Whole Genome Sequencing

Below is my review of the following paper as part of my academic education. This paper allowed me to see a bigger picture of my research and finally click what was important in the ecological research I am doing.

Moreno-Mateos, D., A. Alberdi, E. Morriën, W. H. Van Der Putten, A. Rodríguez-uña, and D. Montoya. 2020. The Long-term restoration of ecosystem complexity. Nature Ecology & Evolution 4:676–685.

Restoration of a Riparian system after Emerald Ash Borer destroyed Fraxinus pennsylvanica. Oatka Creek Park, Scottsville, NY. Photograph by Wendy A Owens Rios

The Long-term Restoration of Ecosystem Complexity

Summary & Analysis

This paper was published as a perspective review in Nature: Ecology & Evolution in May of 2020. The authors reviewed restoration projects and their strategies and concluded that a more broadscale ecosystem restoration can be successful by approaching research of these systems by looking at Ecosystem Complexity. They claim that traditional approaches to assess ecosystem recovery on simple attributes are not achieving results as we like. Simple attributes include looking at taxonomic richness or basic ecosystem functions such as carbon accumulation. Also, assessments of restoration performance are different by ecosystem, by location etc. They found that “1-restored ecosystems may only recover part of their lost biodiversity, functions and benefits to societies even after decades or centuries and 2-active restoration efforts may not yield better results than naturally regenerating ecosystems”(Moreno-Mateos et al. 2020).

The authors suggest in order to advance restoration science and make our efforts successful we need to find ways to measure complexity, identify changes in adaptive potential of species and communities and how these factors can adapt and recover from anthropogenic disturbances over long periods of time. They propose in order to achieve this is to first to define ecosystem complexity as amount of information to describe a metric and an example can be a gradient of complexity from species richness, species composition, functional diversity, genetic diversity, and interaction network structures. In this example each component depends on the other. Measuring changes in ecosystem can be achieved by looking the structure of interactions, functions from those interactions and stability. They indicate how complex it is to study an ecosystem this way and believe that we can achieve this understanding by using chronosequencing or “space-for-time substitutions”.

These are very broad concepts, but the paper continues by describing how ecologists can achieve this understanding of ecosystem complexity and therefore create management plans to implement in ecosystem restoration. The topics covered are measuring Ecosystem complexity by looking at interaction network structure, ecosystem functioning, ecosystem stability, Ecosystem’s adaptive potential, assessing recovery over the long-term and how we can use tools such as Whole genome sequencing (WGS) to determine these factors.

Overall, I felt this paper gave a better understanding where my research can lead to. Using different metrics to restore ecosystems to not only have high biodiversity but strong connections between the organisms. It is a very good paper to give perspective and future direction in all restoration projects. It gives an overview how despite so many efforts to preserve biodiversity and ecosystems, we have fallen short due to our lack of understanding of ecosystems but now with all the new technology and understanding of ecology and evolution, we can progress to a better possibility of restoring degraded ecosystems. (Moreno-Mateos et al. 2020)

Discussion Questions

1. What factors make ecosystem restoration difficult between ecosystem types? Is high biodiversity indicative of ecosystem stability

2. How could we apply this concept of ecosystem complexity to an ecosystem that has high biodiversity but with 40% invasive species?

3. Ecosystem adaptive potential is important as climate change increases perturbations, how can we enhance adaptive potential with the wetland systems we currently work with? What on the ground tasks can we do to make the ecosystem less vulnerable?