Assessment of food web recovery following restoration using resource niche metrics

The primary goal of habitat restoration is to recover the ecological structure, function, and services of natural ecosystems lost due to disturbance. Post-restoration success typically focuses on the return of a desired habitat type, consumer species composition, or abundance relative to a reference site. However, how energy flow responds to habitat restoration has not been widely studied, and there is a need to develop a better understanding of how energy flows through a restored vs reference ecosystem following restoration. We tested recently developed niche metrics as a tool to assess the degree of recovery of ecosystem energy flow and evaluate the success of habitat restoration. Using published stable isotope values from six systems, one to three years post-restoration, we used Bayesian mixing models to quantify resource use by consumers to generate food web hypervolumes for restored and reference habitats in each ecosystem and to quantify similarity in resource use between restored and reference systems. Our analysis showed that there were differences in restoration success at each restoration project between the restored and reference food webs, but two general patterns emerged in the early stages following restoration. Restoration efforts that restore biogenic habitats display lower levels of recovery of food web function than those that only restore abiotic habitat structural. Restoration increases the variability in basal resource use of consumers in food webs that rely heavily on one basal resource, while in food webs that relied on multiple basal resources consumers decrease variability in basal resource use. Our results demonstrate that hypervolume analysis is a powerful tool that can be used to quantify energy flow, the recovery of food web function, and measure restoration success.