Supporting Research in Restoration Biology (original) (raw)

Ecological Restoration, 1996

Abstract

research. W the National Science Foundation initiated the Special Program in Conservation and Restoration Biology (CRB) in 1989, restorationists saw it as a milestone in the coming age of restoration. Most previous research in restoration had been funded privately or, where state and federal funds were involved, was more often for the utilitarian purposes of reclamation or rehabilitation. This was the first time restoration was treated as a legitimate area for basic research. The CRB Program seemed like a move that would help improve the quality of restoration research and promote increased participation by academic researchers. However, the results of the program have been disappointing. Out of some 15 proposals funded each year, on average only one or two were restoration proposals. This reflected the small proportion of restoration proposals submitted and raises the question of why so few researchers chose to submit restoration-oriented proposals. In contrast, the program has been enormously successful for conservation researchers, who submitted the bulk of the funded proposals. Conservation genetics and population-level conservation research have made great strides in both basic and applied research since 1989, and have become part of mainstream research in population ecology and genetics. Partly for this reason, future proposals in this area are likely to be well received by reviewers and panelists engaged in mainstream genetics and population biology research. In fact, "mainstreaming" is the intent of special programs at NSF, the idea being to promote areas that have previously been neglected, raising them to the status of traditional research areas. Special programs at NSF are designed to last some four years, but after seven years of the CRB Program restoration research has still not become part of ecological mainstream research, and has progressed little in conceptual development. To help change this trend in restoration research, we organized a workshop on "Developing the Conceptual Basis for Restoration Biology." We consulted with Scott Collins, a CRB program officer, on the approaches and results that would be most useful for NSF. There are social, political and economic limitations to restoration, but NSF can help only in the area of scientific limitations so we focused our workshop on the scientific aspects of restoration. We all felt that one of the reasons so few ecologists chose to submit proposals is that restoration is still viewed as a discipline without the conceptual basis needed to support basic research. Michael Soule and Kathryn Kohm’s book, Research Priorities for Conservation Biology (1989), helped to develop the conceptual basis for conservation biology, but a similar approach has never been taken for restoration. While Soule and Kohm discussed restoration, they presented it as a job for land managers, and not a scientific discipline. They also downplayed the importance of restoration for conservation, arguing that

Donald Falk hasn't uploaded this paper.

Let Donald know you want this paper to be uploaded.

Ask for this paper to be uploaded.