ABSTRACT
Ecological restoration refers to the practice of restoring, “renaturing,” or re-designing a piece of land. This entry discusses the challenges of bringing a piece of land back to a previous state and its relation to novel ecosystems that have been “restored” into the future and often into unforeseen directions. In this vein, many ecological restoration projects from their beginnings in the 1970s were practice-oriented and were carried out by amateurs who learned as much ecology as they needed for restoring or designing ecosystems.
