Achieving restoration success: Myths in bottomland hardwood forests

Restoration of bottomland hardwood forests is the subject of considerable i nterest in the southern United States, but restoration success is elusive. Techniques for establishing bottomland tree species are well developed, yet problems have occurred in operational programs. Current plans for restorat ion on public and private land suggest that as many as 200,000 hectares cou ld; be restored in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley alone. The ideal o f ecological restoration is to reestablish a-completely functioning ecosyst em. Although some.;argue that afforestation is incomplete restoration, it i s a necessary and costly first step but not an easy task. The 1992 Wetlands Reserve Program in Mississippi, which failed on 90% of the area, illustrat es the difficulty of broadly applying our knowledge of afforestation. In ou r view, the focus for ecological restoration should be to restore functions , rather than specifying some ambiguous natural state based on reference st ands or pre-settlement forest conditions. We view restoration as one elemen t in a continuum model of sustainable forest management, allowing us to pre scribe restoration goals that incorporate landowner objectives. Enforcing t he discipline of explicit objectives, with restoration expectations describ ed in terms of predicted values of functions, causal mechanisms and tempora l response trajectories, will hasten the development of meaningful criteria for restoration success. We present our observations about current efforts to restore bottomland hardwoods as nine myths, or statements of dubious or igin, and at best partial truth.