Joint modeling of environmental and species responses to restoration

Abstract

Restoration outcomes have often unexplained variation. As environmental variables can both affect the restoration outcome and be affected by restoration, studying the interplay between environmental and species responses can reveal reasons behind the variation. For this, we present a methodological framework of jointly modeling environmental and species responses to restoration. We demonstrate the framework with a simulated case study and a real restoration study of changes in vegetation and water table (WT) in forestry-drained boreal peatlands. With these two studies we highlight how the method can be used in cases of confounding variables and missing environmental data. Our study of peatland restoration shows that restoration is generally successful in raising the WT. We also observed that the WT is associated with the abundance of different moss groups, but the variation in the rise of the WT does not seem to explain the variation in the restoration effect for these moss groups. As our framework allows predicting restoration outcomes in different scenarios of environmental variables, it facilitates the development of restoration methods with predictable outcomes.