Restoration science relevant for action

Katharine Suding is a Professor of Ecology at University of Colorado Boulder. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a highly-cited author who has written extensively in the areas of ecosystem dynamics and management, ecological restoration, biodiversity, and conservation. Her current research focuses on managing ecosystems in a rapidly changing world. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and joined the University of Colorado in 2014 from the University of California Berkeley. At CU, she leads the Niwot Ridge Long-term Ecological Research Program, a large multidisciplinary project aimed at understanding high-elevation mountain systems; the Rangeland Resilience Project involving researchers and ranchers across the Western US; and the Boulder Apple Tree Project, focusing on discovering and preserving historic apple trees. In 2018, she received the Robert H. MacArthur Award from the Ecological Society of America, a biennial prize given by the Ecological Society of America to an ecologist for their pivotal contributions to the field.

Richard J Hobbs is Professor and IAS Distinguished Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Western Australia, and leads the Ecosystem Restoration and Intervention Ecology Research Group. Originally from Scotland, where he completed his undergraduate and doctoral degrees, he worked as a postdoc at Stanford University before moving to Western Australia in 1984. There, he worked at CSIRO and Murdoch University before moving to UWA in 2009. His work has contributed to conservation biology, landscape ecology and restoration ecology. He focuses on sound empirical field ecology, conceptual and synthetic development, and practical on-ground application to ecosystem management and restoration. He maintains long-term studies in California and Western Australia. His work on restoration ecology, intervention ecology and novel ecosystems aims to provide a framework to guide management and policy, and has also promoted much needed scientific and public debate in this area.

Professor Yvonne Buckley is the Professor of Zoology at Trinity College Dublin and an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. She is an Irish Research Council Laureate Fellow and is a Highly Cited Researcher having produced multiple papers with citations in the top 1% across fields (Clarivate, Web of Science). She is Section Head for Faculty of 1000 Population Ecology. Professor Buckley is an ecologist specializing in environmental decision making, natural capital management and population ecology. She leads a team of researchers and students seeking to understand the fundamental drivers of animal and plant population processes in a rapidly changing world. She uses these discoveries to provide support for environmental decisions in the areas of biodiversity conservation, invasive species management and habitat restoration. She is the founding chair of a learned society for ecologists in Ireland, the Irish Ecological Association and is chair of the National Biodiversity Forum providing advice to government on biodiversity strategy. She is also a member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Climate Change Specialist Group.

Lars Brudvig is an Associate Professor of Plant Ecology at Michigan State University in the Department of Plant Biology. Lars' research investigates how human activities impact the biodiversity and functioning of ecosystems and approaches to their restoration. He approaches these topics through the application of theory to environmental problem solving, broad-scale surveys, experiments, and collaboration with restoration and management practitioners. Current projects focus on temperate and subtropical North American grasslands and savannas. Before joining the faculty at Michigan State, Lars completed a BA at Carleton College (MN), a PhD at Iowa State University, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

My mission in science is to conduct high quality research to contribute to evidence-based conservation and restoration of coastal ecosystems, with a focus on marine foundation species in intertidal systems. Coastal ecosystems support millions of people in coastal areas all across the world by providing coastal protection services, purifying seawater and mitigating climate change by storing large amounts of carbon. Habitat-building species – seagrasses, salt marsh species, mangroves, shellfish reefs – form the foundation of many coastal ecosystems but are rapidly declining as a result of anthropogenic activities. In my research, I aim to study causes and mechanisms of decline of marine foundation species and their associated communities and to actively try to bridge the gap between science and nature management by contributing to research on restoration and conservation of marine ecosystems and by actively collaborating with nature managers and NGOs.

Sarah is a forest geographer with a background in ecology/biology (MSc, BSc) and human geography (PhD). Hailing from flat and windy rural Manitoba, she has been fascinated by tropical forests (and mountains) since learning about them in preschool. She has worked with community-based forest restoration and conservation enterprises in montane cloud forests in Andean Ecuador and the Nepalese Himalaya, and in lowland jungle in Guatemala’s Peten. Her recent postdoc with the University of Michigan focused on understanding and assessing the social and ecological outcomes of community forestry and restoration. As a postdoc, Sarah coordinates and leads papers and projects bridging the natural and social sciences, bringing ecology to the Forest Transition, social science to ecological restoration, and teasing apart the benefits derived from different types of secondary forests for people and nature. Through her research, she aims to identify ways to maximize forest recovery and conservation in rural landscapes while enhancing the sustainability of people’s livelihoods. A recipient of the prestigious L’Oreal Women in Science Mentorship Award, she is also dedicated to environmental and science education with experience in field-based environmental education, designing case studies to teach complex problems, and training educators to teach science.

Biography not yet available

Lindsay is Professor in Environment and Development at the Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds. Her research interests broadly encompass environment and international development, and consider human-environment interactions through a systems approach. Her research projects focus on: socio-ecological resilience of mangrove systems in Vietnam; the costs of action and inaction on land degradation in Rwanda and Somalia; peatland restoration in Indonesia; and livelihoods and rural development in Brazil. Lindsay was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for her work on sustainability in the world’s drylands and is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder. She was coordinating lead author for the IPBES Africa regional assessment and lead author on the IPBES Land degradation and restoration assessment. She is lead author for both the IPCC special report on land use and climate change, and the IPCC 6th assessment report. 

Professor Jim Harris, Chair in Environmental Technology: Jim’s research and teaching interests are wide - ranging from microbial ecology and how the diversity of the microbiota and their spatio-temporal distribution affect ecosystem processes, through to ecological restoration, systems ecology, agro-ecosystems, natural capital and ecosystem services, policy implications and ecosystem resilience. His pioneering work in the development and application of soil microbial community characterisation methodology, ranging from catabolic profiling of carbon utilisation, PLFA analysis, resilience, and the thermodynamic efficiency of soil systems, has been set in a broad theme of land degradation, restoration and reclamation, and land-use monitoring in general. It has covered everything from providing objective ecosystem measures of the success of restoration programmes, through the interaction of governance and science, setting conceptual frameworks for restoration ecology, policy, to educational initiatives. He has applied his fundamental work widely: in disturbed landscapes, urban areas, semi-natural and agricultural systems; restoration ecology, soil health and resilience, and in the quantitative assessment of ecosystem goods and services.

Margaret A Palmer is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on the hydrology and ecology of freshwater ecosystems. She is an international leader in aquatic restoration science, has >175 peer-reviewed articles and led the latest edition of the widely used text Foundations of Restoration Ecology. She is an Editorial Advisor for Science magazine, serves on the Water Science & Technology Board of the National Academies of Science, and is Director of National Science Foundation’s “National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center”. She is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Ecological Society of America (ESA), and the Society for Freshwater Science (SFS). Among her awards: Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship, SFS Award of Excellence in Science, ESA Sustainability Science Award, and Ruth Patrick Award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography. She has been invited speak in diverse settings including regional and international forums, science-diplomacy venues (eg in North Korea), and popular outlets such as the Stephen Colbert show.

Biography not yet available

Daniel Laughlin is an Associate Professor in the Botany Department at the University of Wyoming. He received his doctorate in Forest Science from Northern Arizona University in 2009, served as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato in New Zealand from 2011-2017, then moved back to the Rocky Mountains to work in Laramie, Wyoming in 2017. Daniel has studied the restoration of wet meadows, prairies, wetlands, temperate forests, temperate rainforests, and montane forests. He is currently working to develop new methods for setting restoration targets based on functional traits.

Biography not yet available

Dr Nancy Shackelford is a restoration ecologist working in the Suding Lab at Colorado University, Boulder. She received her PhD in British Columbia studying ecosystem resilience and restoration in oak-savanna systems, and her Masters degree in Western Australia studying native woody species encroachment and fire management. Her work is focused on blending complex ecological science with practical restoration techniques. She works in any ecosystem that she finds, but her heart is always in the grassland.

Jason's research examines how communities of interacting species respond to environmental changes. In particular, he is interested in how the architecture of interaction networks (such as food webs or pollination networks) comes to exist, and how it responds to environmental drivers. He is also interested in the conditions under which biodiversity loss has the greatest impact on ecosystem functioning and services, and in searching for win-win scenarios to balance agricultural production and conservation. In some cases, this requires knowledge of how species traits and the local environment jointly shape the structure of interaction networks such as food webs, and how this structure affects processes at the entire community level. He addresses these questions using a variety of systems (plants, insect herbivores, parasitoid-host systems, plant-mycorrhizal associations) and approaches (field observations, field and lab experiments, meta-analysis).

Stephen D Murphy is a Professor in the School of Environment, Resources & Sustainability at the University of Waterloo and the Editor-in-Chief of Restoration Ecology. He has mentored 200+ graduate students & 1000+ undergraduate students in classes in the technical, business, ethics, and policy aspects of restoration ecology, ecological restoration, conservation, ecological indicators, and management for private and public lands. He has 300+ peer reviewed contributions (journal articles and conference presentations, books, technical reports for academia, industry, government, the United Nations, NGOs). These have focused on the academic and practitioner realms of restoration ecology, ecological rehabilitation and reclamation, conservation ecology, natural resources management. Steve’s work has recently focused on how rapid ecological changes can be assessed via new technologies like AI and drone-mounted thermal cameras and the larger implications of mass/rapid ecological changes for goal setting and assessment baselines in conservation and restoration ecology.

Katharine Suding is a Professor of Ecology at University of Colorado Boulder. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a highly-cited author who has written extensively in the areas of ecosystem dynamics and management, ecological restoration, biodiversity, and conservation. Her current research focuses on managing ecosystems in a rapidly changing world. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and joined the University of Colorado in 2014 from the University of California Berkeley. At CU, she leads the Niwot Ridge Long-term Ecological Research Program, a large multidisciplinary project aimed at understanding high-elevation mountain systems; the Rangeland Resilience Project involving researchers and ranchers across the Western US; and the Boulder Apple Tree Project, focusing on discovering and preserving historic apple trees. In 2018, she received the Robert H. MacArthur Award from the Ecological Society of America, a biennial prize given by the Ecological Society of America to an ecologist for their pivotal contributions to the field.