Microorganisms have critical roles in the functioning of soil in nutrient cycling, structural formation, and plant interactions, both positive and negative. These roles are important in reestablishing function and biodiversity in ecosystem restoration.

After centuries of colonization and trade, South Africa is now home to alien species from Australia, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. As an antidote, a pioneering program called Working for Water (WfW) has cleared about 1 million hectares of invasive species in the past 15 years.

Species invasions impose key biotic thresholds limiting the success of ecological restoration projects.

Ecological restoration is an activity that ideally results in the return of an ecosystem to an undisturbed state. Ecosystem services are the benefits humans derive from ecosystems. The two have been joined to support growing environmental markets with the goal of creating restoration-based credits that can be bought and sold.

Ecological history plays many roles in ecological restoration, most notably as a tool to identify and characterize appropriate targets for restoration efforts. However, ecological history also reveals deep human imprints on many ecological systems and indicates that secular climate change has kept many targets moving at centennial to millennial time scales.

Across the United States, researchers are firing up experiments to determine how rising temperatures could reshape the nation's forests. The studies encompass the pines and maples of eastern forests in Massachusetts and North Carolina, the spruce and fir of northern Minnesota, and the alpine tundra ecosystem above the treeline in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.