Alternative Approaches to Urban Natural Areas Restoration: Integrating Social and Ecological Goals

Ecological restoration incorporates land management principles and activities aimed at returning a damaged or degraded ecosystem back to a key historic trajectory in order to achieve goals of ecosystem health, integrity, and sustainability (Society for Ecological Restoration 2004) . Please consult Chap. 1 (Lamb et al. this volume) for additional perspectives. In the United States, many restorationists look to ecological conditions present before the time of European settlement as the key historic landscape they are seeking to restore, and employ an approach to restoration management that has been called “classical ecological restoration” (Callicott 2002 ) . Nine attributes of successfully restored ecosystems identi fi ed in the Society for Ecological Restoration International’s Primer ( 2004 ) conform closely to this classical management approach, and have been summarized by Ruiz-Jaen and Aide ( 2005 ) as falling along three major ecological dimensions: (1) diversity measured in terms such as the richness and abundance of native plants and other species; (2) structure measured in terms such as the age, distribution, and density of vegetation; and (3) processes measured in terms such as the presence of natural disturbance regimes such as fi re. While these dimensions and their measures can help guide restoration efforts on a trajectory toward ecosystem health, integrity, and sustainability, the ultimate success of classical ecological restoration is judged by how well the measures fall within an historic range of variability found in closely matched reference sites (Ruiz-Jaen and Aide 2005 ) . Thus in a broader sense, the overarching goal of the classical approach is authenticity or fi delity in how a restored site looks and functions like one before European settlers arrived, minimally in fl uenced by contemporary human impacts and values (Higgs 2003 ) . Chapter 8 Alternative Approaches to Urban Natural Areas Restoration: Integrating Social and Ecological Goals