Volume 24 (2019) Article 19

Declaring success in Sphagnum peatland restoration: Identifying outcomes from readily measurable vegetation descriptors

by E. Gonzalez and L. Rochefort

Published online: 21.06.2019

Summary

Managers of restoration projects need readily applicable tools that give them an unequivocal declaration of success or failure based on primary goals that may vary according to different jurisdictions. We used restored extracted Sphagnum peatlands in Canada to illustrate how different types of plant communities assigned to different restoration outcomes can be identified from readily measurable descriptors. Vegetation was surveyed from 5–10 years after restoration at 2–3 year intervals in a total of 274 permanent plots in 66 restored peatlands located across 4500 km, from Alberta in the drier continental interior to the wetter maritime coastal province of New Brunswick. Plant community data were subjected to a k-means clustering that resulted in three restoration outcome categories. A linear discriminant analysis (LDA) model (the “declaration tool”) correctly classified 91 % of the plots in a calibration database that included 75 % of the peatlands, and 93 % of the validation database (25 % of the peatlands), into the restoration outcome categories, using plant strata and number of years since restoration (only) as descriptors. The model includes classification functions that can be used to assign a new plot (not used to construct the model) to its restoration outcome category. We found that ~70 % of the severely degraded peatland is successfully regenerating towards the target plant community.

Citation

Gonzalez, E. & Rochefort, L. (2019) Declaring success in Sphagnum peatland restoration: Identifying outcomes from readily measurable vegetation descriptors. Mires and Peat, 24(19), 1–16. (Online: http://www.mires-and-peat.net/pages/volumes/map24/map2419.php); doi: 10.19189/MaP.2017.OMB.305

Reviewers

IMCG and IPS acknowledge the work of the reviewers.