Preserving, Enhancing, Restoring & Creating Ecosystem Services

Conservation biology and restoration ecology together represent the scientific disciplines behind PERC initiatives. In addition to outright acquisition and banking of natural areas, ecosystem protection can include forms of ecological recovery that allow natural systems to regain desirable attributes through succession. Enhancement strategies include any activity that improves the value of an ecosystem via improved performance of ecosystem services, even if the changes are small. This can even include improvement of non-degraded or 'natural' ecosystems. Restoration applies to any attempt to rehabilitate elements of ecosystem structure or function without necessarily attempting wholesale ecological reconstruction. Creation refers to attempts to reconstruct ecosystem services on a site that has been severely disturbed (such as mine land), or on a site that appears to promise badly needed ecosystem functions (such as new habitat to bolster survival of a declining species) supporting high-priority social goals.

As examples, restoration ecology methods can be employed to:

• modify landscape grades
• breach or reconfigure dikes
• control invasives
• introduce fire
• collect and plant seeds
• transfer or establish live species
• impound or channel water
• reduce cultivation, grazing, or recreation impacts
• modify soil character
• establish hay, sod or thatch