water@leeds, School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK.
water@leeds, School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK.
Sci Total Environ. 2016 Nov 1;569-570:361-372. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.06.169. Epub 2016 Jun 24.
Many degraded ecosystems are subject to restoration attempts, providing new opportunities to unravel the processes of ecological community assembly. Restoration of previously drained northern peatlands, primarily to promote peat and carbon accumulation, has created hundreds of thousands of new open water pools. We assessed the potential benefits of this wetland restoration for aquatic biodiversity, and how communities reassemble, by comparing pool ecosystems in regions of the UK Pennines on intact (never drained) versus restored (blocked drainage-ditches) peatland. We also evaluated the conceptual idea that comparing reference ecosystems in terms of their compositional similarity to null assemblages (and thus the relative importance of stochastic versus deterministic assembly) can guide evaluations of restoration success better than analyses of community composition or diversity. Community composition data highlighted some differences in the macroinvertebrate composition of restored pools compared to undisturbed peatland pools, which could be used to suggest that alternative end-points to restoration were influenced by stochastic processes. However, widely used diversity metrics indicated no differences between undisturbed and restored pools. Novel evaluations of restoration using null models confirmed the similarity of deterministic assembly processes from the national species pool across all pools. Stochastic elements were important drivers of between-pool differences at the regional-scale but the scale of these effects was also similar across most of the pools studied. The amalgamation of assembly theory into ecosystem restoration monitoring allows us to conclude with more certainty that restoration has been successful from an ecological perspective in these systems. Evaluation of these UK findings compared to those from peatlands across Europe and North America further suggests that restoring peatland pools delivers significant benefits for aquatic fauna by providing extensive new habitat that is largely equivalent to natural pools. More generally, we suggest that assembly theory could provide new benchmarks for planning and evaluating ecological restoration success.
许多退化的生态系统都需要进行恢复尝试，这为揭示生态群落组装过程提供了新的机会。以前排水的北方泥炭地的恢复主要是为了促进泥炭和碳的积累，已经创造了数十万新的开阔水域池塘。我们通过比较英国奔宁山脉未排水（从未排水）和已排水（阻塞排水渠）泥炭地的完整（从未排水）与恢复（阻塞排水渠）的池塘生态系统，评估了这种湿地恢复对水生生物多样性的潜在好处，以及群落如何重新组装。我们还评估了一个概念，即通过将参考生态系统与无集合（因此随机与确定性组装的相对重要性）的组成相似性进行比较，可以更好地指导恢复成功的评估，而不是通过群落组成或多样性的分析。群落组成数据突出了与未受干扰的泥炭地池塘相比，恢复池塘中大型无脊椎动物组成的一些差异，这可以用来表明替代恢复终点受到随机过程的影响。然而，广泛使用的多样性指标表明未受干扰和恢复池塘之间没有差异。使用零模型对恢复进行的新颖评估证实了来自全国物种库的确定性组装过程在所有池塘中都相似。随机因素是区域尺度上池塘间差异的重要驱动因素，但这些效应的规模在研究的大多数池塘中也相似。将组装理论纳入生态系统恢复监测中，使我们能够更有把握地得出结论，即从生态角度来看，这些系统的恢复已经取得了成功。将这些英国的发现与欧洲和北美的泥炭地进行比较进一步表明，通过提供大量与自然池塘相当的新栖息地，恢复泥炭地池塘为水生动物提供了显著的益处。更一般地说，我们建议组装理论可以为规划和评估生态恢复成功提供新的基准。
