Abstract
Our current planetary crisis moves the need for effective ecosystem
restoration centerstage and compels us to explore unusual options. We
here propose exploring combinatorial approaches to restoration
practices: management practices are drawn at random and combined from a
locally relevant pool of possible management interventions, thus
creating an experimental gradient in the number of interventions. This
will move the current degree of interventions to higher dimensionality,
opening new opportunities for unlocking unknown synergistic effects. In
this concept, regional restoration hubs play an important role as
guardians of locally relevant information and sites of experimental
exploration. Data collected from such studies could feed into a global
database, which could be used to learn about general principles of
combined restoration practices, helping to refine future experiments.
Such combinatorial approaches to exploring restoration intervention
options may be our best hope yet to achieve decisive progress in
ecological restoration at the timescale needed to mitigate and reverse
the most severe losses.