This edited book, one in a series of books supported by the Society for Ecological Restoration International (SER), describes, in 15 chapters, five large ecosystem restoration projects in the USA. Each of the five case studies, namely the Florida Everglades, the Platte River Basin and the Upper Mississippi River Basin in Midwestern USA, the California Bay/San Joaquin Bay in northern California and Chesapeake Bay in eastern USA, are described in sections divided into 3 chapters. The first chapters in each section give overviews of the restoration being undertaken and are written by a number of authors, including the book editors. The second chapters describe the ecology of the systems being restored and progress to date; all five of these chapters are written by the same author, wetland ecologist Tom Chrisman of Florida International University, giving the book good continuity in ecological descriptions. The third chapters in each case are provided by invited social scientists to address the economic issues of these restoration projects.
A final conclusion chapter by one of the editors, Mary Doyle, summarizes the case studies in the book as ‘photographs,’ recognizing that the projects and sometimes the ecosystems are constantly changing. Perhaps a better metaphor might be that these are non-ending movies, not photographs, something that cannot be captured in a book alone. She describes the projects in terms of timing and level of funding; their costs are collectively in the US$ tens of billions. Setting and meeting goals are described as essential yet difficult to do in practice. Other issues described in this chapter include federal-state partnerships (important in the USA for such projects), the quality of the science, adaptive management (ecosystem-based management) conflict management (human-based management), and building and maintaining public awareness and support.
The book is intended for scientists, policy makers and possibly even the general public, anyone who is interested in ecological restoration. It is also meant to focus on large projects, both in terms of area being restored and in term of fiscal budgets.
The projects are indeed enormous, both in complexity and in size. The unintended message in the book may be that managing restoration at this scale may indeed be impossible, given the political complexities. For example, there is a decidedly mixed review currently of whether the Everglades restoration project, perhaps the biggest project described here, has had much of a measurable (ecological) effect, even though it is being carried out in only one state and enormous sums of money have been spent. The restoration has brought a lot of attention to the Everglades nationally and has bolstered many wetland researchers' careers with grants and publications. But will the Everglades be a healthier ecosystem in the end? The Upper Mississippi River restoration, only part of the much larger Mississippi-Ohio-Missouri (MOM) River Basin, is less clear on its goals, given that there are 26 locks and dams currently on this river system with no discussion of a true river restoration even remotely on the table.
There are almost no illustrations in the book until Chapter 13 (the general description of the Upper Mississippi River), where 10 figures (four are actually tables) appear. I found this lack of data and graphics illustrating principles and history, especially ecological, to be a weakness of the book, as change in ecological characteristics over time is the essence of restoration. Maps are provided at the beginning of each restoration project description, but are not illustrated in a consistent style. The maps lack the most important part of any map, a scale. Indeed this book is about large scale, but to people not familiar with the USA, some of the maps could be showing a few square kilometres.
I am surprised that this book (and perhaps others in this series) does not use SI units. I am writing this review for an international journal and I am sure non-USA readers would be frustrated with the miles, acres and square miles throughout the book. This book is supported by Society for Ecological Restoration International (underscore is mine). However, in order to restore USA ecosystems, engineers and landscape architects are required as well as scientists, hence perhaps the use of units still employed in ecological engineering and restoration in the USA. Nevertheless, metric units should have been supplied in parentheses.
A useful feature of the book is a nine-page list of abbreviations and acronyms. A sign of bureaucratic times is that there are so many acronyms, so this list will be quite useful to the reader. It would have been useful if the editors had provided definitions or functions of these terms/organizations, as well as their names.
Another criticism is that the positions and affiliations of the authors of this book do not appear anywhere; these would help determine the expertise or at least background of the authors. Conversely, the names and addresses of the Island Press Board of Directors and their affiliations are given in the back of the book.
The editors and authors are to be congratulated for their wisdom in bringing large-scale ecological restoration projects into one volume. These are indeed large scale and any attempt to find general principles in these types of mega restoration projects is appreciated. I am disappointed in the lack of evenness from section to section and the issues I discuss above. Perhaps the restorations need to be given with science-based ecological engineering (or restoration) principles (see Mitsch & Day Reference Mitsch and Day2004, 2005; Mitsch & Jørgensen Reference Mitsch and Jørgensen2004) to provide additional perspective and depth and application to similar large-scale projects in the future.
