Ecological restoration should be redefined for the twenty-first century

Forty years ago, ecological restoration was conceptualized through a natural science lens. Today, ecological restoration has evolved into a social and scientific concept. The duality of ecological restoration is acknowledged in guidance documents on the subject but is not apparent in its definition. Current definitions reflect our views about what ecological restoration does but not why we do it. This viewpoint does not give appropriate credit to contributions from social sciences, nor does it provide compelling goals for people with different motivating rationales to engage in or support restoration. In this study, I give a concise history of the conceptualization and definition of ecological restoration, and I propose an alternative definition and corresponding viewpoint on restoration goal‐setting to meet twenty‐first century scientific and public inquiry.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Restoration Ecology

• Publication date

  2017-09-01

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Philosophy, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/rec.12554PMID 29400359PMCID 5792077
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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