Conceptual and operational perspectives on ecosystem restoration options in the European Union and elsewhere: A response to Kotiaho & Moilanen

Abstract

Summary: Kotiaho & Moilanen (2015) highlighted what they call a conceptual flaw in our study (Egoh et al. 2014) and some operational flaws. Here, we respond to these. According to Kotiaho & Moilanen (2015), the conceptual flaw is that we supposedly neglect both the magnitude of degradation and the magnitude of improvement of the ecosystem condition expected due to restoration in the original paper (Egoh et al. 2014). However, we took magnitude of degradation into account in the paper (Egoh et al. 2014) by not including areas with habitats and species in favourable conservation status and also excluding artificial surfaces such as urban areas. We argue that the operational flaws, the authors cite (specifically with respect to the inclusion of restoration cost), were taken out of context and the calculations on the effective area requiring restoration within a grid cell were not well understood by the authors. In the original paper (Egoh et al. 2014), restoration cost was only included in one analysis to investigate the effects of including different criteria on the area selected. Also, each grid cell selected contained only areas defined as restorable in our analysis. Synthesis and applications. The points raised by Kotiaho & Moilanen (2015) are surely relevant and pertinent to the general discussion on restoration efforts, but when applied to our study, these points are out of context. Areas identified for restoration should consider magnitude of degradation as in our study. However, the inclusion of cost should be carefully considered; in our case, we used a proxy for cost only to understand the implication of including many criteria in identifying priority areas. The points raised by Kotiaho & Moilanen (2015) are surely relevant and pertinent to the general discussion on restoration efforts, but when applied to our study, these points are out of context. Areas identified for restoration should consider magnitude of degradation as in our study. However, the inclusion of cost should be carefully considered; in our case, we used a proxy for cost only to understand the implication of including many criteria in identifying priority areas.