Accelerating Ecological Succession in Restoration and Remediation

This conference addresses the bottleneck between the production of scientific knowledge and the ecological restoration industry for a complex audience that includes undergraduate and graduate students, scientists, and business persons interested in institutional development in the field. From a communication perspective, the conference is organized into twelve topics of conversation, three for each target audience. From a functional perspective, the topics are reframed by the research, innovation, and business ecosystems involved in producing and applying scientific knowledge. An up-to-date analysis of the notion of ecological succession is done. The complexity of the available knowledge is contrasted with the practice of ecological restoration, which is currently driven mainly through know-how rather than formal proprietary knowledge. Due to the difficulty of evaluating ex-ante, relying primarily on know-how can lead to greenwashing and lack of results when this knowledge is missing in the implementation phase. In this context, a clear analytical understanding of the problem’s structure can help to overcome the current situation. Specific messages for each audience and general conclusions are presented below. For the undergraduate audience: • Holistic and individualistic models are extreme cases • Primary succession is enriched by disturbance processes and small-scale secondary succession • Functionality increases with diversity at very large scales of analysis/policy. At smaller scales/operational management, the situation is much more complex For the graduate and post-graduate audience: • The succession theories evolved from simple models to a portfolio of diverse models and from natural processes to socio-ecological ones • Knowledge mapping is a powerful tool to detect the structure of the available literature • Succession processes vary by taxonomic group and tend to be more holistic for communities of sessile organisms and individualistic for communities of very mobile organisms. For the business audience: • State-transition models can be helpful for adaptive management, whatever the succession mechanisms • Multiscale methodology decreases costs, and multiple objectives of restoration increase the acceptance and financial sustainability • Restoration projects rely very much on know-how. Formal technology transfer is underdeveloped For the audience interested in institutional development: • For large-scale ecosystem restoration (LER) to be valuable socio-ecological experiments, one needs long-term monitoring • The mechanisms in the institutional succession of long-term ecological research (LTER) sites show how this monitoring might be achieved. • There is a good potential for framing successful LER in LTER by coupling the LER monitoring with continuous research projects and teaching activities in a complex ecosystem of organizations. The deterministic and stochastic ecological processes co-occur in real situations to various degrees. Unique integrated methods for accelerating succession are needed in every setting. Pragmatic state-transition models can serve management needs. A multi-scale methodology can devise methods and portfolios of technologies. Keeping the ecosystems on the desired trajectory involves long-term monitoring and active management. The cost-benefit analysis can benefit from a multi-objective approach, addressing ecosystem services at local and landscape scales. A functional trait approach coupled with ecological stoichiometry may help control the system towards producing target ecosystem services. The long-term monitoring needed for active measures can benefit from the institutional experience accumulated in long-term ecological research sites. The evolution of the institutional context can remove the bottleneck in transferring scientific knowledge from research to restoration business. The analysis was funded by Fulbright-Romania Grant 867/2024, and Florida Gulf Coast University supported its communication. Special thanks go to Dr. Kevin Erwin and Dr. Brian Bovard, who made this happen, and the fantastic community of students and professors of the Water School of FGCU.