Restoration enhances wetland biodiversity and ecosystem service supply, but results are context-dependent: a meta-analysis.

ABSTRACT: Wetlands are valuable ecosystems because they harbor a huge biodiversity and provide key services to societies. When natural or human factors degrade wetlands, ecological restoration is often carried out to recover biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES). Although such restorations are routinely performed, we lack systematic, evidence-based assessments of their effectiveness on the recovery of biodiversity and ES. Here we performed a meta-analysis of 70 experimental studies in order to assess the effectiveness of ecological restoration and identify what factors affect it. We compared selected ecosystem performance variables between degraded and restored wetlands and between restored and natural wetlands using response ratios and random-effects categorical modeling. We assessed how context

SUBMITTER: Meli P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3990551 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature