Restoration of Ecosystems – Bridging Nature and Humans

Bridging the natural and social sciences, this cross-disciplinary textbook comprehensively presents both the scientific basis of restoration ecology and practical aspects of ecosystem restoration. In doing so, it highlights the diversity of land-use types with a focus on Central Europe and presents case studies of practical restoration projects. The textbook provides a profound and up-to-date, but also critical overview of the state of knowledge for students dealing with the environment, scientists as well as practitioners. This book opens up the broad spectrum of degraded ecosystems of Central European natural and cultural landscapes. In further chapters, marine ecosystems and their restoration as well as development potentials but also limitations of ecosystem restoration are discussed in more detail. The ecological basics are extended by an interdisciplinary perspective taking into account environmental ethics, sociology, anthropology and economics. In addition toproviding an up-to-date overview of the various fields and areas of activity in restoration ecology and ecosystem restoration, this textbook offers a valuable foundation for science, study and practice. Readers will also receive guidance on literature searches and critical fact analysis, and instructors on teaching in Higher Education and interdisciplinary approaches to discussions in restoration ecology.

The author

Stefan Zerbe  is a landscape ecologist and teacher and researcher at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in South Tyrol (Italy). He is particularly interested in restoration ecology and building interdisciplinary bridges between the natural and social sciences. Against this background, he was in charge of developing and managing two international master’s programs.
The  translation was done with  the  help of  artificial intelligence (machine translation by  the service DeepL.com). A  subsequent intense human revision was done primarily in terms of  scientific terms, style and content so that the  book will read stylistically differently from  a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to  further the  development of  tools for  the  production of  books and on  the  related technologies to  support the  authors