Abstract
Excerpt: There is increasing interest in developing better predictive tools and a broader conceptual framework to guide the restoration of degraded lands, and biogeochemistry plays a key role in re-establishing historical disturbance regimes or abiotic conditions and relies on successional processes to guide the recovery of biotic communities (Suding et al., 2004). Knowledge of biogeochemical fluxes is especially important in scaling up from the ad hoc, site- and situation-specific approach to the restoration of entire landscapes for production and/or conservation reasons (Hobbs and Norton, 1996). In addition to numerous examples of the restoration of mined areas (Bradshaw, 1997, Parrotta and Knowles, 1999, Amichev et al., 2008), the restoration of wetlands provides special challenges due to the complexity of biogeochemical processes (Zedler and Callaway, 1999, Waddington and Warner, 2001, Fink and Mitsch, 2007, Kimmel and Mander, 2010). The biogeochemistry of heavy metals (Brown et al., 2003, Richards et al., 2010) and radionuclides (Mudd, 2001) is also among the core interests of ecosystem restoration.