restoration

The Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus) disappeared from the Negev, the desert region in southern Israel, in the 1920s. But a remnant herd survived in the Shah of Iran’s zoo. Some of these animals were reintroduced to the desert beginning in 1982. Recently scientists at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Washington University in St. Louis have been inventing clever new ways to check on the status of these famously elusive animals.

Biologist Alan R. Templeton fell in love with the eastern collared lizard that lives in the hot, dry Ozark glades when he was 13. By the time he returned from  postgraduate work, 75 percent of the lizard populations had vanished. Over the next 30 years, he reintroduced lizards to a few glades and then sought to establish the disturbance regime that had once sustained them by advocating for the highly controversial process of landscape-scale burning. The cover article in the September issue of Ecology celebrates the success of this prolonged effort.

A seven-year experiment shows that pond communities bear the imprint of random events in their past, such as the order in which species were introduced into the ponds. This finding locates one of the wellsprings of biodiversity but also suggests that it may not be possible to restore ecosystems whose history we cannot recreate.

In science, it’s best to be good, but sometimes it’s better to be lucky. Ecologist Owen Sexton, Ph.D., professor emeritus of biology in Arts & Sciences, had just completed a census of snakes at a conservation preserve northwest of St. Louis when the great flood of 1993 deluged the area, putting the preserve at least 15 feet under water. The flood provided Sexton with a rare opportunity: His collected data and the flood would combine to make “the perfect study” of how an area rebounds from natural disaster.

Sexton observes a flooded Marais Temps Clair.In science, it’s best to be good, but sometimes it’s better to be lucky. Ecologist Owen Sexton, professor emeritus of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, had just completed a census of snakes at a conservation preserve northwest of St. Louis, when the great flood of 1993 deluged the area, putting the preserve at least 15 feet under water. The flood provided Sexton with a rare opportunity: his collected data and the flood would combine to make “the perfect study” of how an area rebounds from natural disaster.

Sexton observes a flooded Marais Temps Clair.In science, it’s best to be good, but sometimes it’s better to be lucky. Ecologist Owen Sexton, professor emeritus of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, had just completed a census of snakes at a conservation preserve northwest of St. Louis, when the great flood of 1993 deluged the area, putting the preserve at least 15 feet under water. The flood provided Sexton with a rare opportunity: his collected data and the flood would combine to make “the perfect study” of how an area rebounds from natural disaster.