Restorationists Return Native Species To Damaged Lands

Is conservation enough? This new breed of scientists seeks to do more, repairing the harm done by man CHICAGO--As a boy in his native England, ecologist Stuart L. Pimm spent almost every weekend watching birds. As an adult, he abandoned the outdoors to take up such theoretical pursuits as modeling change in biological communities. But now the University of Tennessee ecologist is back on a birdwatch of a different sort, this time in the tropical underbrush of a small Pacific island near Guam. For Henry F. Howe, restoration biology has been a labor of love. A tropical ecologist by training, the 43-year-old Howe became curious about prairies when he arrived at the University of Iowa in 1978. "I wanted a project that allowed me to stay at home" in the U.S., recalls Howe, who had been doing most of his work in Costa Rica and Panama. Specifically, he wondered what effect the timing of a fire has on the prairie population. Present-day restorationists, like the American Indians and European settlers before them, tend to burn prairies in the early spring, when the plants are dormant. But the natural fires that ignite the prairies, triggered by lightning, tend to strike well into the growing season, during the hottest part of the summer. In 1986, on his own time and with only a small amount of outside money, Howe began planting experimental patches of prairie on his farm and burning them at different times of the year. Now with support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he is exploring his idea that burning by people has shifted the species composition to favor plants that start to grow late in the season. A child prodigy as a naturalist, Howe worked as a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Army before pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Michigan. He then spent 10 years at the University of Iowa, leaving in 1988 to become a professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His work as a restoration biologist has also led him to a new field, that of politics. He has joined other scientists in campaigning for a new federal agency to support environmental research that would be called the National Institutes of the Environment (NIE). "Environmental sciences really need an NIE--a mission-oriented agency on a large enough scale to make a difference," he says. --C.M. Pimm and his co-workers are trying to return the Guam rail to the wild. This tiny bird species disappeared in the last decade from its only home, having been hunted down by a tree snake released inadvertently on Guam. Now scientists are using a transmitter to track the movements of 30 rails released in February on the island of Rota. The project, funded largely by the Wildlife Preservation Trust and Wildlife Conservation International, is the first United States attempt to restore a bird species that now exists only in captivity. Like an increasing number of scientists, Pimm is putting aside his computer and getting his hands dirty to bolster a burgeoning field called restoration biology. These efforts span the globe. For decades dedicated workers have replanted prairie grasses and wildflowers in the Midwest. More recently, scientists have begun to restore damaged ecosystems from the tropics to the tundra. They are driven by the realization that unspoiled habitats available for conservation have almost disappeared and that more aggressive measures are needed to maintain biological diversity. "Ecologists like to work in pristine wilderness," says Pimm. "But the reality is the world is not like that, and it's getting worse." Committed to slowing the loss of species that goes with the loss of wild lands, Pimm and other scientists have joined a movement to resuscitate lands that have been mined, plowed, or otherwise manhandled to the brink of extinction. Restoration was once largely the province of state and federal land managers, landscape architects, environmental consultants, and self-taught naturalists. Now it is taking on the trappings of a science. A peer-reviewed journal is scheduled to appear in 1992. A newly formed professional society just held its second annual meeting here. Even the National Science Foundation is providing a little new money to support research in this nascent field, called restoration biology or restoration ecology. "The field has skyrocketed in the last five years," says Dennis King, a Washington, D.C., environmental consultant. King is working on a report for the Environmental Protection Agency that analyzes the cost and quality of certain restoration techniques. Ecologists like Pimm are motivated by the threat of species extinction. But they also see an opportunity to turn an observational and theoretical science into an experimental one. "A lot of people are beginning to realize there is something to learn from synthetic communities," says Henry F. Howe, an ecologist at the University of Illinois, who is experimenting with prairie restorations (see accompanying story). Restorationists liken their task to rebuilding a car engine. One can learn a lot by taking an engine apart, they say. But the real payoff comes in putting it--or an ecosystem--back together. For example, Pimm based the design of the Guam rail restoration on population theories and studies of game bird introductions. The experiment will test those ideas. If the science of restoration is new, the practice of it is not. Restorationists trace their roots to the 1930s, when botanist Theodore M. Sperry and a dozen Civilian Conservation Corps workers under the guidance of Aldo Leopold planted native prairie plants on an old farm field outside the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison. The seed and plants came from wildflowers and grasses they found along railways, and from the few remaining patches of original prairie. The first large-scale restoration project, it became known as Curtis Prairie, after John Curtis, an ecologist who studied the rejuvenating effects of prairie fire at the site. Less than 1 percent of federal support for extramural research is for environmental biology. And some scientists blame that funding shortage for the lack of progress in ecology and for the urgent need for a National Institute of the Environment. Led by Henry Howe, ecologist at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and Stephen Hubbell, an ecologist at Princeton University, about 50 biologists, social scientists, physical scientists, and federal officials met in December 1989 to plan such an institute. Modeled after the National Institutes of Health, this agency would be composed of institutes on biotic resources, ecosystem protection and management, sustainable resource use, the changing human environment, and climate change. So far, Congress seems to support the idea, although its actions so far fall quite a bit short of actually creating such a body. The House has called for a study by the National Academy of Sciences to examine the need for such an institute, and a similar move is under way in the Senate. There has been a "tremendous upwelling of support," says Howe, who hopes that this institute would help stimulate a better understanding of conservation and restoration biology. --C.M. Prairie restoration remains at the heart of the movement. It was the theme of last April's meeting in Chicago of the fledgling Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), which drew some 500 participants. "Prairies have a special place in the business of restoration," says William R. Jordan III, a writer for the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. Jordan is trained in the plant sciences and is the editor of Restoration & Management Notes, a nine-year-old semitechnical journal that has adopted SER. He is also one of the founders of the society. Among the most endangered of all North American ecosystems is the tall-grass prairie that was converted to the corn belt, says Jordan. Restored prairies count among the movement's greatest successes. In the Chicago metropolitan area alone, he says, native plants are being replanted and maintained by fire in about 120 sites of public and private land. The largest is at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where biologist Robert Betz of Northeastern Illinois University is directing the restoration of the mile-wide patch inside the four-mile ring that houses the world's most powerful proton accelerator. here, cleared forests are being replanted with native trees. In the West, delicate arid lands that have been overgrazed or overrun by recreational vehicles are receiving intensive care. Farther north, an oil field that was once Alaskan tundra is being readied for restoration. Even the U.S. Army is trying to revive training grounds worn down by legions of combat boots and heavy vehicles. Restorationists have also spread their reach to coastal wetlands in Florida and other states. But successes there are less clear. Environmental consultants report a booming business--with one noting that his company's revenues have doubled annually in recent years--in wetland restoration and creation. The growth is largely the result of a 10-year-old federal policy that allows a developer to fill in a wetland if an equal parcel of wetland is restored or created. That policy, known as mitigation, has created opportunities for ecologists who know how to produce such an area. But many experts question the wisdom of that strategy. They wonder, for example, how well a wetland, with its often complex hydrology and biological communities, can be created on the site of, say, an old strip mine. The result is often a "wetland garden" that may not perform the functions of a natural wetland, says Mary E. Kentula, an ecologist under contract to the EPA's wetland program. Some observers worry that such results from this science, which many feel remains more of an art, could undermine the scientific reputation of restoration. Indeed, a third or more of SER's 1,500 members are nonscientists. (One participant in Chicago identified himself on his name tag as a "Prairie enthusiast.") This diverse membership also makes the scientific organization part garden society and part philosophical society. At the Chicago meeting, the participants discussed not only restoration and global change but also tips on harvesting prairie seed and the ethics of restoring an ecosystem. This last subject is prompted by the fears of some environmentalists that restoration may serve primarily to justify the continued encroachment on natural habitats. Many scientists, for example, worry that the policy of mitigation may be used as an excuse to turn an existing wetland into a shopping mall. And it's small comfort, the researchers add, to be assured by a developer that a new wetland area of comparable size will be created somewhere else. To shore up its science, SER is using ecological functions to define what constitutes a restored system. It has a standing committee that hopes to examine over the next several years every type of ecosystem--from prairies to wetlands--with the intention of setting down appropriate criteria. Recently, the society announced plans for the 1992 debut of a peer-reviewed journal, Restoration Ecology. It also is creating a database that will consolidate information on restoration projects. Much of that information is now scattered in obscure conference proceedings, agency reports, and other hard-to-find literature. The movement has even begun to carve out a niche in the scientific establishment. This month the National Science Foundation gave out its first award for restoration research. John Ewel, a professor of botany at the University of Florida in Gainesville, received a three-year, $467,000 grant as part of a special competition in conservation and restoration biology. "It's an initiative whose time had come," says NSF's Joann Roskoski, who coordinated the proposal process. The competition is now a permanent part of the NSF budget, with an annual deadline in September. Nevertheless, restoration biology still has a long way to go before it catches up with its companion disciplines, ecology and conservation biology. In the recent NSF competition, only five of the 158 proposals submitted to compete for $3.5 million dealt with restoration. "I was pretty surprised at that," says Roskoski. She thinks the short amount of time between announcing and closing the competition last year--four months--was a factor, and that the brochure discouraged site-specific restoration projects. "But anything with a research component . . . would certainly be appropriate," she adds. Along with Ewel's proposal to study diversity and plant longevity in reconstructed tropical ecosystems, NSF also funded 15 projects in conservation biology. For now, restorationists might not mind that conservation gets most of the money; after all, most consider themselves preservationists or conservationists first. "Restoration is an emergency measure," says Jordan. "Preservation is a better thing." He and others generally frown on the practice of creating a wetland at the expense of a natural one, even though many restorationists make their living at it. What matters most, they say, is stemming the loss of species and habitats. Says Pimm, who is a member of the Society for Conservation Biology as well as the Society for Ecological Restoration, "I have a nightmare that a generation from now people will ask, `How come you let 50 percent of the species become extinct?' That's not a nightmare I want to live with."

Restorationists Return Native Species To Damaged Lands

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