Ecological restoration:State of the art or state of the science?

This special issue contains 13 papers presented at the Groningen Conference on Restoration Ecology, held from 25–30 August 1998 in the Netherlands. This conference was organized under the auspices of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), the European Ecological Federation (EEF), the Dutch–Flemish Ecological Society (NECOV) and the International Ecological Engineering Society (IEES). This was the second International Conference on Restoration Ecology with over 200 participants from 22 countries; the first conference was held in Zurich, Switzerland (Urbanska et al. 1997). The second conference resulted in a total of 29 papers, published in the journals Restoration Ecology (13 papers), Applied Vegetation Science (2000 Vol. 3:1; 8 papers) and Ecological Engineering (8 papers). The objective of the conference was to investigate the state‐of‐the‐art scientific knowledge of restoration. Due to its geographic position in Europe, the conference was clearly biased toward cultural and semi‐natural ecosystems. Other consequences of its location in a densely populated area were an emphasis on the societal involvement in proposed restoration efforts and the desire to combine multiple functions in restoration projects