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The SER Standards, cultural ecosystems, and the nature‐culture nexus—a reply to Evans and Davis
Author(s) -
McDonald Tein,
Aronson James,
Eisenberg Cristina,
Gann George D.,
Dixon Kingsley W.,
Hallett James G.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
restoration ecology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.214
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1526-100X
pISSN - 1061-2971
DOI - 10.1111/rec.12913
Subject(s) - ecosystem , naturalness , nexus (standard) , natural (archaeology) , environmental ethics , restoration ecology , environmental resource management , ecology , geography , environmental science , computer science , philosophy , archaeology , physics , quantum mechanics , embedded system , biology
Evans and Davis claim the SER Standards use a “pure naturalness” model for restoration baselines and exclude most cultural ecosystems from the ecological restoration paradigm. The SER Standards do neither. The SER Standards consider both “natural” ecosystems (that are unequivocally not cultural) and “similar” cultural ecosystems as suitable reference models. Furthermore, Evans and Davis propose assessing whether a cultural ecosystem exhibits “good, bad, or neutral impacts from humans on ecosystems” as the basis for reference models. We argue that such an approach would overlook the indispensability of native ecosystem benchmarks to measure human impacts and provide a springboard for social‐ecological restoration.