Application of the Society for Ecological Restoration's Standards Based Restoration Tool in the Great Basin

Decades of improper grazing management have degraded many landscapes within the Great Basin, which now require human intervention to restore ecological function. To better evaluate post-restoration progress and monitoring, the Society for Ecological Restoration has created a tool called the Recovery Wheel, focusing on ecosystem attributes such as physical conditions, species composition, and four others that each contain three or four sub-attributes. Each of these sub-attributes is evaluated and given a grade between 0-5 depending on condition compared to a reference site. The Great Basin, with its extensive ongoing and planned restoration efforts such as beaver dam analog installations, livestock exclusion fencing, and vegetation management, provides an ideal setting to test and evaluate the Recovery Wheel’s effectiveness across a variety of restoration techniques. In this study, 26 restoration sites were assessed in the summer of 2024 and revisited in 2025, with four additional sites added, to construct Recovery Wheels for each year and location. Changes in attribute scores between years were analyzed to track ecological progress and identify whether sites are improving, regressing, or remaining stable. Mean total scores saw a slight increase from 57.07 to 57.41, which was not statistically significant. In addition to evaluating progression at all sites, this study examined two common riparian restoration treatments, beaver dam analogs, and fenced enclosures. Results showed consistent increases in scores for fenced exclosure, increasing from 61.7 to 64.8, while beaver dam analog sites varied greatly and decreased in overall scores from 56.8 to 51.8. Remote sensing indices were also used also to evaluate riparian restoration site changes in vegetation and water availability, finding a statistical significance in differences between restoration sites and control sites at 19 of the 20 sites for at least one of NDVI or NDWI. The results of this study can inform adaptive management and improve data-driven restoration planning in semi-arid ecosystems.