ABSTRACT
While interest in ecological restoration has grown rapidly in recent years, especially during the decade since the passage of the Surface Mine and Reclamation Act of 1977, research in this area has generally been highly empirical in nature. “Restoration ecology” is a term of our own devising and perhaps calls for a bit of explanation. By this term author do not mean simply an ecologically sophisticated or environmentally sensitive approach to the task of ecological restoration. In particular, Anthony Bradshaw, one of the few academic ecologists in the English-speaking world to have taken a serious interest in restoration as an intellectual as well as a practical challenge, suggested that, far from being merely a form of “applied” ecology, restoration actually represented the “acid test” of ecological understanding.
