Links between community ecology theory and ecological restoration are on the rise

Abstract

Community ecology is frequently invoked as complementary to and useful for guiding ecological restoration. While the conceptual literature is devoted to this unification, first-hand accounts from practitioners and ecologists suggest that integration may be weak in practice. To date, there have been no analyses of how extensively community ecology theory appears in the empirical restoration literature. We address this knowledge gap with the first quantitative assessment of the extent to which community ecology concepts appear in empirical restoration literature by analysing the use of community ecology theories, concepts and conceptually derived tools in the design and interpretation of 1,000..