This book summarises a four-year study bringing together scientific experts and environmental managers with the aim of assessing the effectiveness of past environmental restoration programmes. The work stemmed from a growing body of evidence in Southeastern Australia of a lack of detectable changes. Reasons posited included inadequate monitoring (temporal and/or spatial) to disentangle the drivers from the observed responses, long-time lags between intervention and response and the many potentially confounding factors. But increasingly, funding organisations require their investments must be based on knowledge rather than assumptions. This study combined historic datasets and contemporary surveys, with expert opinion and modelling (both biophysical and social) to see if they could detect changes in environmental conditions – principally water quality and vegetation change – and the extent to which they could be attributed to past human interventions. Their approach, if not the specific details, provides a wealth of useful ideas and insights. These range from adopting new techniques such as Bayesian networks to combine numeric and ‘softer’ information through to simple yet fundamental steps such as at the outset of each restoration programme there must be simple, measurable and generally agreed targets. The editors are to be congratulated on bringing together the work of over 50 contributors in a coherent manner. The book contains 21 chapters with numerous case studies detailing the effectiveness or otherwise of remedial measures on water quality and vegetation change. These deal with experiences in transdisciplinary research, bringing together multiple lines of evidence, using best professional judgement and local knowledge and practice. The book contains numerous peer-reviewed references, and further information can be downloaded from the Internet.