title: Using ecosystem engineers to restore ecological systems.
abstract: Ecosystem engineers affect other organisms by creating, modifying, maintaining or destroying habitats. Despite widespread recognition of these often important effects, the ecosystem engineering concept has yet to be widely used in ecological applications. Here, we present a conceptual framework that shows how consideration of ecosystem engineers can be used to assess the likelihood of restoration of a system to a desired state, the type of changes necessary for successful restoration and how restoration efforts can be most effectively partitioned between direct human intervention and natural ecosystem engineers.
authors.affiliation: Department of Zoology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824, USA. jebyers@unh.edu
authors.forename: James E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Byers
authors.forename: Kim
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Cuddington
authors.forename: Clive G
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.forename: Theresa S
authors.initials: TS
authors.lastname: Talley
authors.forename: Alan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hastings
authors.forename: John G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Lambrinos
authors.forename: Jeffrey A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Crooks
authors.forename: William G
authors.initials: WG
authors.lastname: Wilson
mesh_terms: D004463:Ecology; D017753:Ecosystem; D008962:Models, Theoretical