Advancing restoration ecology: a new approach to predict time to recovery

1. Species composition is a vital attribute of any ecosystem. Accordingly, ecological restoration often has the original, or ‘natural’, species composition as its target. However, we still lack adequate methods for predicting the expected time to compositional recovery in restoration studies.
2. We describe and explore a new, ordination regression-based approach (ORBA) for predicting time to recovery that allows both linear and asymptotic (logarithmic) relationships of compositional change with time. The approach uses distances between restored plots and reference plots along the successional gradient, represented by a vector in ordination space, to predict time to recovery. Thus, the approach rests on three requirements: (1) the general form of the relationship between compositional change and time must be known; (2) a sufficiently strong successional gradient must be present and adequately represented in a species compositional data set; and (3) a restoration target must be specified...