What the Great British Bake Off can teach us about wetland restoration – some notes from Samantha Dawson
With Plant Conservation Day in mind, Samantha Dawson’s post discusses characteristics of wetland plants and her new paper, Plant traits of propagule banks and standing vegetation reveal flooding alleviates impacts of agriculture on wetland restoration.
Many of the world’s wetlands are highly degraded and they are one of the most threatened types of ecosystems. To attempt to halt or reverse this trend, there are lots of small and large restoration projects underway in many places. One of the most widely-used restoration methods is to re-introduce flooding to degraded wetlands, with the idea that if you provide water, the plants that were there before will return. Unfortunately, we haven’t had much success predicting the outcome of these restoration efforts and we do not always understand why restoration succeeds or fails.
Dawson explains that understanding how different filters affect plant traits means we may be able to predict and manage restoration more…
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Ecological Change 