Engineering Resilience: Novel Approaches in Ecosystem Restoration

Abstract

Climate nonstationary and exacerbated disturbance regimes, as well as ubiquitous human alteration of landscapes and seascapes, are increasingly challenging ecosystem restoration. In this scenario, restoration strategies based on static reference states, or short-term structural goals, tend to provide delicate results that fail when subjected to extreme events, new stress factors, or changing baselines. The current essay is a synthesis of the new paradigm of engineering resiliency towards ecosystem restoration that combines the principles of design-oriented engineering and theories of ecology of complexity, thresholds, and adaptive capacity. We explain conceptual differences and complement between ecological and engineering resilience, as well as highlighting resistance, recovery trajectories, and adaptability as aspects of the operation of performance. We also study fresh resilience-enabling strategies, such as nature-based solutions and gray-green systems, ecological engineering and system-level design, digital technologies of monitoring and prediction, and adaptive management based on the concept of feedback-control. In the land, freshwater, coastal, and urban systems, we evaluate such strategies underway to increase the integration of persistence of functions and provide ecosystem-vitality despite disturbance, as well as the inescapable problems related to scaling, governance, equity, and long-term sustainability. Last but not least, we define the areas of priority in research, such as the standardized measures of resilience, long-term monitoring, uncertainty-aware models, and responsible innovation to reduce unintentional ecological and social effects. Reconceptualizing restoration as a performance-based design challenge that is enshrined in coupled human-natural systems, engineering resilience provides a transdisciplinary, rigorously grounded approach to creating ecosystems that survive and adapt in a fast-changing world.