Category Archives: Restoration and Reclamation

Once species or their habitat have declined, restoration and reclamation is needed. One important component of restoration and reclamation is developing habitat offsets. Many countries have adopted habitat offsetting policies (e.g., Canada, United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and United Kingdom), where the ideal goal is ecological equivalency, such that offsets are done in a manner which replaces habitats “like-for-like” in areas in close proximity to where those habitats were displaced. When ecological equivalency cannot be achieved with habitat offsets, such as when the extent, duration and intensity of the impacts are sufficiently broad in spatio-temporal scale (e.g. surface mining, Sun et al. 2017), offsetting currencies and flexibility may be needed. Research topics, includes: assessing the efficacy of fish stocking for restoration, developing methods to for offsetting fisheries productivity, advancing expertise and methodologies in hydroacoustics.

Poesch, M.S., Walker, S.C., and D.A. Jackson (2009) Functional diversity indices can be driven by methodological choices and species richness. Ecology 90(2): 341-346.

Abstract:

Functional diversity is an important concept in community ecology because it captures information on functional traits absent in measures of species diversity. One popular method of measuring functional diversity is the dendrogram-based method, FD. To calculate FD, a variety of methodological choices are required, and it has been debated about whether biological conclusions are sensitive to such choices. We studied the probability that conclusions regarding FD were sensitive, and that patterns in sensitivity were related to alpha and beta components of species richness. We developed a randomization procedure that iteratively calculated FD by assigning species into two assemblages and calculating the probability that the community with higher FD varied across methods. We found evidence of sensitivity in all five communities we examined, ranging from a probability of sensitivity of 0 (no sensitivity) to 0.976 (almost completely sensitive). Variations in these probabilities were driven by differences in alpha diversity between assemblages and not by beta diversity. Importantly, FD was most sensitive when it was most useful (i.e., when differences in alpha diversity were low). We demonstrate that trends in functional-diversity analyses can be largely driven by methodological choices or species richness, rather than functional trait information alone.

Citation: Poesch, M.S., Walker, S.C., and Jackson, D.A. 2009. Functional diversity indices can be driven by methodological choices and species richness. Ecology 90(2): 341-346.

Also Read:

Theis, S.*, Ruppert, J.*, Shirton, J.* and M.S. Poesch (2022) Measuring beta diversity components and beneficial effects of coarse woody habitat introduction on invertebrate and macrophyte communities in a shallow northern boreal lake: implications for offsetting. Aquatic Ecology 56: 793-814.

Poesch, M.S., Mandrak, N.E., and R. L. McLaughlin (2008) A practical framework for selecting among single species, multi-species and ecosystem-based recovery plans. Canadian Journal for Fisheries & Aquatic Science 65: 2656-2666.

Abstract:

Science-based approaches for selecting among single-species, community-, and ecosystem-based recovery plans are needed to conserve imperilled species. Selection of recovery plans has often been based on past success rates with other taxa and systems or on economic cost, but less on the ecology of the system in question. We developed a framework for selecting a recovery plan based on the distributions and ecology of imperilled and nonimperilled species across available habitat types and applied it to fishes in the Sydenham River, Ontario, Canada. We first tested whether distributions of fishes were adequately predicted by habitat features hypothesized to limit the distributions of imperilled fishes versus a broader set of habitat features known to predict fish distributions. We then tested whether imperilled species occurred in similar or disparate habitat types. For the Sydenham River, an ecosystem-based recovery plan was deemed most appropriate because imperilled species occur in disparate habitat types. We lastly provide decision criteria to facilitate applications of our framework to the selection of recovery plans for other species and systems.

Citation: Poesch, M.S., Mandrak, N.E., and McLaughlin, R.L. 2008. A practical framework for selecting among single species, multi-species and ecosystem-based recovery plans. Canadian Journal for Fisheries & Aquatic Science 65: 2656-2666.

Also Read:

Castaneda, R.A., Ackerman, J.D., Chapman, L.J., Cooke, S.J., Cuddington, K., Dextrase, A., Jackson, D.A., Koops, M.A., Krkosek, M., Loftus, K., Mandrak, N.E., Martel, A.L., Molnar, P., Morris, T.J., Pitcher, T.E., Poesch, M.S., Power, M., Pratt, T.C., Reid, S.M., Rodriguez, M.A., Rosenfeld, J., Wilson, C., Zanatta, D.T. and D.A.R. Drake. (2021) Approaches and research needs for advancing the protection and recovery of imperilled freshwater fishes and mussels in Canada. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 78 (9): 1356-1370.