8 Habitat restoration

Habitat restoration is the purposeful  rehabilitation of an area to recreate a functioning ecosystem. It can be accomplished through management, protection, and reestablishment of plants by returning abiotic factors (e.g., soil chemistry, water content, disturbance) and biotic factors (e.g., species composition, interactions among species) to historical levels. Assisting recovery of habitat can be as simple as removing an invasive species and reintroducing a lost species or a lost function or can be as complex as altering landforms, planting vegetation, changing the hydrology and reintroducing wildlife.

Watch a unique restoration project below on how fires is used to restore habitat.

Adopted from: "Fire for Ecosystem Restoration" by Royal Botanic Garden is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Restoration is carried out for one of the following reasons:

• To restore highly degraded localized sites such as mine sites
• To improve productive capability in degraded production land
• To enhance conservation values in protected landscapes
• To enhance conservation values in productive landscapes

Four (4) basic steps used in habitat restoration and rehabilitation:

1. Identification of the cause for degradation
2. Elimination of toxic soil pollutants, addition of nutrients to depleted soil, addition of new top soil and elimination of disruptive species
3. Protection of the area from further degradation and from the disruptive effects of fires
4. Monitoring restoration efforts, assessing success and modifying strategies.