2024/05/31 by Matthias C. Rillig, Anika Lehmann, Rebecca Rongstock +2 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Environmental Science · #Species Distribution and Climate Change #Ecosystem dynamics and resilience #Sustainability and Climate Change Governance
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/gcb.17361
openalex publication_date 2024/05/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/12
Our current planetary crisis, including multiple jointly acting factors of global change, moves the need for effective ecosystem restoration center stage and compels us to explore unusual options. We here propose exploring combinatorial approaches to restoration practices: management practices are drawn at random and combined from a locally relevant pool of possible management interventions, thus creating an experimental gradient in the number of interventions. This will move the current degree of interventions to higher dimensionality, opening new opportunities for unlocking unknown synergistic effects. Thus, the high dimensionality of global change (multiple jointly acting factors) would be more effectively countered by similar high-dimensionality in solutions. In this concept, regional restoration hubs play an important role as guardians of locally relevant information and sites of experimental exploration. Data collected from such studies could feed into a global database, which could be used to learn about general principles of combined restoration practices, helping to refine future experiments. Such combinatorial approaches to exploring restoration intervention options may be our best hope yet to achieve decisive progress in ecological restoration at the timescale needed to mitigate and reverse the most severe losses caused by global environmental change.