Forum | The humpty-dumpty effect and community restoration
Oikos Forum paper:
An eco-evolutionary perspective on the humpty-dumpty effect and community restoration
Annette E. Evans, Marketa Zimova, Sean T. Giery, Heidi E. Golden, Amanda L. Pastore, Christopher P. Nadeau, Mark C. Urban
Why is it so hard to fix broken ecosystems? This Forum paper seeks to improve our idea of the “humpty-dumpty effect” that is often invoked to explain restoration failure.
Reassembling an ecosystem is more complicated than putting puzzle pieces back together when the "pieces" have changed in size (population size) or shape (species traits), according to the authors of the study. Using this puzzle-piece concept, the authors evaluate 271 efforts to restore fragmented ecosystems. They describe examples where restoration failure seems to have resulted from changes in size, shape, or both.
Their paper concludes with a checklist of five recommendations as a starting point to help future restoration efforts “more successfully put the ecological community pieces together again.”
Oikos Forum is a place where ecological ideas can be kicked around and examined from new angles. Forum papers bring together multiple fields, push boundaries, and offer new ways of interpreting existing data. They strive for conceptual unification and serve as a point of departure for future work rather than simply summarizing previous bodies of theory and data. Through the Forum we seek to challenge current thinking on ecological issues and provide a high level of synthesis in the field of ecology.
Forum artwork and summaries by Abby McBride/Sketch Biologist
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