Functional Restoration: From Concept to Practice

Abstract

A forward-looking approach to forest restoration is advocated with the emphasis on restoring ecosystem health. This approach, called functional restoration, uses indicators of ecosystem health such as mortality, regeneration, reproduction, and productivity, as well as surrogates such as structural diversity, age class distribution, and species diversity, to characterize ecosystem health. Although restoring ecosystem health is the primary emphasis, manipulating species composition and forest structure are the means for accomplishing functional restoration. Managers have experience in measuring most indicators of ecosystem health and, for the most part, cost effective methods for measuring them exist. Instead of using the composition and structure from the historic record as the benchmark, ecosystem health as measured from the time of treatment—i.e., the initial conditions, and changes in these conditions with time—becomes the measure of success. By applying this approach, restoration becomes an investment in the future.