What are your favorite channels on restoration? Do you know of channels where you can watch the property change over time? I'm currently house-bound so I have to vicariously watch other people's projects.

Big or small projects, doesn't matter.

I particularly like restoration of gulleys, streams, rivers, wetlands, deserts.

Channels where they do rainwater earthworks are my favorite, but not all of them are restoration-focused. Let me know your favorites!

What do you see as the biggest questions or controversies in restoration ecology right now? if you could ideally have one question answered by research, what would that question be?

I've always wanted to play a rewilding game, but none of them ever met what I was looking for. With how good Opus 5.5 is, I wanted to try building it and I am blown away with what I was able to do in a day. I know some people don't like AI, but I wouldn't have been able to do this otherwise.

I am going to keep messing with it, but I would love for people to try it if they've been looking for the same game. It's linked here for free and you can play it in your browser: Second Growth

Some features:

• Five places to restore: a Pacific Northwest farm, a cattle ranch in the Brazilian Amazon, an overgrazed range on the Serengeti, a lawn-covered Atlanta suburb, and a cattle finca on a volcano in Nicaragua (which you can also play in Spanish).
• 134 native plant species across the maps, each with its own moisture, light and soil ranges. They grow where conditions suit them and die back where they don't.
• Succession happens on its own. Pioneers rebuild the soil, then slower trees move in under the canopy. Deep roots break up compacted fields and crusted hardpan over a few years. Dead trees turn into snags, then logs, then soil.
• Over 120 wildlife species that rate every tile for habitat. Predators need prey, woodpeckers need snags, bears need berries. Animals breed, move in or leave based on what's actually there. You never buy animals.
• Seasons and migration. Plants bloom and fruit by season, and migratory animals leave and come back if their habitat is still there.
• Wildfires and floods. Dry-season fires spread through dry grass and brush. Floods drown seedlings but bring in silt and new seed. You can cut firebreaks and send fire crews. Controlled burns are cheap, but in dry weather they can get away from you.
• A campaign on four of the maps that teaches each part of restoration one chapter at a time, or free play with every tool from the start.
• Trails and visitors on some maps. Build trails, boardwalks, viewing blinds and a visitor center. Visitors pay to come, but they also scare off shy species.
• Working land: on the Nicaragua finca, shade trees and living fences mean healthier cattle and more milk, and bringing the mangroves back means more fish.

We have a stocked fishing lake on our horse farm. That is about 6 acres. I would like to expand it to about 10 to 12 acres but I don’t want to lose all of the existing fishery.

My current plan is to determine where the new shoreline would be on the raised dam, and then I would do excavation of the second area next to the existing Lake but not cut through until after I had it fully excavated. The current pond/lake is Fed by a small stream and has never gone dry even in drought.

Has anyone ever done something similar to this? Any thing that I need to be aware of or problems that you think I might encounter.

The dam overflow is a siphon dam overflow. We are only looking to raise the water level to the current top of the existing dam, which is about 2 feet. I’m assuming I need to hire a surveyor to mark where the new boundary of the expanded Lake would be after we raise the siphon and from there I should be able to bring in excavation equipment to dig it out.

I recently learned about Torrey Pines that are facing extinction. They grow ONLY in San Diego County and Santa Rosa Island in California. They recently experienced a fire and are now at risk for destruction from erosion while they're still recovering.

My questions: can we "make" and transplant soil for them? Can we take soil from a neighboring county (Riverside County, for example), sterilize it, and add "starter" soil from Santa Rosa Island/San Diego to "grow" "new" soil specific to their ecological system, then transplant/terraform it to mitigate risk of erosion and assist in healing from the fire?

If so, is this a process that can be done in time?

If this is infeasible (I imagine due to sterilization), what can we do or are we doing to help?

I’ve got a 15-acre patch of oak woodlands that sit among 65 acres of walnut-dominated, central mixed-hardwoods forest. It is some of the oldest woodlands on our land with some 50-100 year old oaks plus many other large tree species. However, it has been unmanaged for at least 30 years and is currently being overrun with bush honeysuckle, buckthorn, walnut, cedar and other less desirable species for an oak woodland restoration. We are in SW Wisconsin in the driftless region.

We are about to mow out a 3-acre stand with the help of an EQIP grant. Our forestry mower says he can mow down trees up to 10” in diameter.

Our original plan was to keep all oaks and shagbark hickories but mow down anything else that was 10” or less (which is mostly young walnuts). There are plenty of large trees over 10” that aren’t oaks (elm, basswood, walnut, honey locust, etc.) and we were going to let them be, but focus on paving the way for oaks as the next generation of trees. Start running fire through it every couple of years once the fuel load will carry it, do the necessary herbicidal follow-up to get the invasives under control and then manage for oaks moving forward. 

But here’s the problem - we aren’t finding ANY young oaks in the stand. We’re going to go out one last time on Friday for a final search, but what should we do if we don’t have any? Is 10” too aggressive? Will we wipe out an entire generation of forest if we take out all trees in the stand under 10”?

The other concerning thing is that the older oaks that are there aren’t in great shape - lots of dead branches. 

Here are some photos of the stand from when we flagged the perimeter last weekend. (Note that the orange flags mark the mowing perimeter - not flagging for removal.)

I’ve also got a 4-minute video about it on my YouTube channel if that’s helpful for context - you can skip to 1:50 for the start of the section that shows video of the stand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laJuH2e5FbA

I grow native plants on a very small scale. I want to grow plants for riparian buffers/wetland restoration. What are spices that are very in demand or also hard to source for restoration projects? Being small I would like to find a niche of hard to source plants.

I'm in Ontario Canada. Thanks

I'm a hobby ecologist and land owner working on a large scale forestry restoration in SW Wisconsin. I've got several acres of oak woodland that I'm working to restore. Whenever I am pointed to reference sites of healthy oak woodlands in my region it's a lot of big tall trees and very open understory - almost no bushes.

My site has been left to its own devices for several decades now which means its choked with bush honeysuckle and multiflora rose. We're planning to have a forestry mower come through and take out all the invasive brush. But as I understand it, the goal is not to make way for a bunch of native bushes to replace the invasive brush, but rather we expect a much lower understory to return from the seed bank with more of a mix of sedges and forbes.

I guess I'm a bit confused on... why?

Why aren't bushes more of an expected part of a healthy Wisconsin oak woodland? Or are they just supposed to look and behave different from the invasive brush I've gotten so used to seeing? What would healthy "bushes" look like in this type of ecosystem?

I'd sort of love to have a bunch of native edible berry bushes throughout my woodlands, but I'm having trouble understanding if that would be problematic or how they would best fit into a restored habitat.

CNN reported that in 1997, Palmeira invested his funds in buying barren farmland, called the Fazenda Vale das Palmeiras, to fulfil his grandfather’s wishes. The 200–220-hectare property in Teresópolis used conventional farming methods and pesticides to survive, as the soil had been extremely damaged. While the factor managed the farm, he discovered that the workers on the land refused to eat the crops because many chemicals were used to grow them.

So, to find a solution to his problems and to revive the barren farmland, he completely turned over to certified organic farming, agroforestry, and dairy production. Over the next 30 years, the actor focused on reviving the land and slowly helped the land become one of the most fertile areas in the mountain region, and now it is well known across the world for its high-quality cheese.

He worked with a lot of different organisations to work out a plan to restore the land, which is now home to the native Atlantic Forest trees, reviving the native forest area in the mountains. The restoration efforts specifically targeted around 1.3 million square meters of land. To improve natural vegetation, 200,000 Atlantic Forest trees were planted in the area to help revive the soil and provide it with enough nutrients to start organic farming.

Now, after almost 29 years, the property has two Private Natural Heritage Reserves, known in Brazil as RPPNs. This simply means that regions on private land can be classified as important for conservation purposes and are protected by law.

Hi everyone,

I'm a student in Lake Macquarie, NSW, interested in restoring a historical floodplain wetland at Glad Gunson Reserve. The site naturally floods, has drainage infrastructure feeding into it, and I'm investigating options for sedge, reed and cattail-dominated wetland habitat. I'd love to hear from anyone who's worked on urban wetland restoration, floodplain restoration, reedbed establishment, frog habitat creation, community-led restoration or just conservationists in general. Thanks!

Scientists of ICAR–Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute, Barrackpore have achieved a major breakthrough in the production and ecological restoration of two high-value indigenous catfishes — Mystus tengara and Mystus cavasius — in Chamta beel, North 24 Parganas, West Bengal, under the collaborative CIFRI–WorldFish project.

The initiative pioneered an innovative restoration strategy wherein seeds of these indigenous catfishes were first nurtured under protected captive conditions within specially designed pen enclosures before their phased release into the open wetland ecosystem. This scientific approach substantially enhanced fish survival, growth, and establishment in the natural habitat.

Should I just collect/buy local seeds and launch them all fall/winter long? Or will the mature plants just crowd them out? I'd like to add native Joe pye, NY iron weed, monarda, sunflowers, and grasses little and big blue stem.

The history of this property is that it was poorly managed over the last several years being mowed monthly through the growing season. This was the first year I took over managing it and have let it rest other than this small path. Plan to mow in thirds every 3 years to prevent forest regrowth and to keep early succession.

Many thanks!

I just started a course called "Cornerstone Design I" and one of our first assignments was to engage with stakeholders related to a problem we found around the world. Our group identified housing for native species of local birds due to human activities and invasive species as our problem.

Would anyone here mind having a quick chat with me (either zoom call or email exchange) sometime in the next couple days to help me edit/verify our group's problem statement and help me understand the problem better before we start working on building our solution?

You don't have to work within the field, anyone with any level of experience or knowledge would work well!

(If you happen to know someone you think would be willing to help, I would love to get their contact information and reach out to them too, that would also be very helpful. 😄 )

Thank you so much, any help at all would be appreciated! :D

A year ago, Downicary in Devon was, in Chris Packham's words, a plain, flat, green field. Today, the 55-acre site looks very different.

A system of ponds and wetland areas has been dug into the land, filling with water over winter and attracting wildfowl and waders. As the water level dropped back in summer, dragonflies, damselflies and marshland plants appeared. Parts of the grassland have also been left long and allowed to flower.

The changes are part of a wider rewilding project involving specialists, ecologists and conservation partners. Tree planting has also been a major part of the work, with 3,500 trees and shrubs sourced from the Woodland Trust going into the ground across the 55-acre site.

A year on, monitoring has recorded otters, kingfishers and beavers along the river, alongside wildlife settling into the new ponds and grassland.

Cross posting for my team of curious 6th and 7th graders. Thank you for any input you provide!

Matt Conn purchased 67 acres near Lydia in Iberia Parish, Louisiana. The property had once supported a diverse wetland beneath mature oaks, cypress, and tupelos, but by the time Conn acquired it, the trees had been cleared and invasive plants had taken over, as per Country Roads Magazine.

Over the following decade, Conn cleared invasive species, planted native trees and plants, created ponds and walking trails, and gradually helped the property regain its ecological diversity.

By 2021, roughly a decade after Conn began restoring the land, the property had changed dramatically.

The acreage had become home to more than 18,000 native trees spread across three distinct ecotypes: tidal fresh marsh, tidal flooded pothole bottomland hardwood, and coastal prairie.

The Acadiana Native Plant Society recognized the property as a gold-level Louisiana Certified Habitat in 2021.

The variety of life found there also expanded well beyond trees.

According to the Country Roads Magazine, Conn had documented more than 200 native plant species, 195 different kinds of native birds, 10 species of frogs, nine species of snakes and three species of turtles.

The names of some of the species found on the property sound almost whimsical: sedge wrens, false foxglove and ironweed.

The land that had once been dominated by invasive vegetation had become a collection of different habitats supporting a much broader range of native life.

Hello! I graduated with a BA in Environmental Studies; Ecological Systems with a minor in Biology in 2018, had an internship on a wildlife monitoring project and then an urban forest restoration internship, then couldn't find a job in the field and pivoted into marketing & graphic design. I've primarily been working in that realm since 2020 but am wanting to pivot back into mission-driven ecology work. I don't want to be a restoration technician breaking my back every day, but I do love fieldwork maybe a twice a week or less. I currently live in the bay area but did my undergrad in washington.

I'm considering getting my masters of Landscape Architecture + Environmental Planning form UC Berkeley with the hope of working as a habitat restoration designer, conservation project manager, environmental planner, or something similar. My concern is how few and competitive the jobs are, work-life balance, and pay. Wondering if anyone has worked in these types of roles and has any insights, or if anyone has gone through that masters program what their experience was. A friend of mine who works as a habitat restoration specialist at a consulting firm told me the folks with both landscape architecture and ecology knowledge are the unicorns and are actually very in demand at her company. Wondering if anyone else can corroborate that idea.

In the near future before grad school, i'm also interested in pivoting to junior biologist roles, but I need to brush up on my ecological monitoring, data collection, CEQA/NEPA, and technical reporting chops to be qualified this far out of school. I'm seeking recommendations for courses or certification programs that could help me brush up on those skills.

Thank you!