A population approach to evaluate grassland restoration - a systematic review

How do we know if restoration goals are achieved? In practice, the criteria used to evaluate the success of restoration actions are numerous and can be defined at different ecological scales, i.e. at the population, community or ecosystem level. Most studies about restoration success monitoring assessed attributes corresponding to the community or ecosystem levels like species diversity, vegetation structure and ecological processes. Has the population approach been disregarded to evaluate restoration success? This systematic review of the literature aimed to identify how often plant population traits were used to monitor restoration of grasslands. Practically, 3133 papers were reviewed among which 1065 reported monitoring of plant species after a restoration action. Only 153 papers used a population approach and represent the core of this review. Detailed results and paper content will be presented with the aim to identify restoration protocols (with or without species addition), species of interest, population attributes and processes considered to evaluate restoration success