Definitions

The totality of genes, species, communities, and systems in a specific geographic region or location. The richness, diversity, distribution, and evenness (rarity and commonality) at these four scales play an important role in determining biodiversity. The conservation of biodiversity, through time and at all scales of ecological organization, is critical for the survival of life on Earth. Conserving biodiversity requires the identification of key variables so that goals and objectives may be set. Education related to biodiversity must be bottom-up, place-based, and inquiry-based so that the critical elements of local nuance and variability can be understood. 

All remains and potentials of human activity, including physical objects, ideas, behaviors, and traditions. They include commonly acknowledged things like human earthworks, structural remains, artifacts, socio-cultural complexes (towns, cities, etc), archaeological sites, and less commonly considered objects like culturally introduced plants. They include things that are dead and static, and living and ever-changing. They include subtle patterns that may be several steps removed from direct human behavior – such as a slight bend in a creek that reflects a single-day’s sand extraction 300 years prior. Essentially, cultural resources include anything that remains as evidence of human activity.

“Diversity” is calculated by combining richness and abundance (% cover for each species), and is a reflection of variety in species, dominance, and evenness. The formula we use (see below) produces an index number that may be used to compare across different plant community types. This number has proven critical for tracking change during restoration projects, but also for comparing relative health in natural communities across the region. The “Diversity” number ranges from 0-5. The closer to 5 the number is, the more diverse the community is. Some communities have naturally low diversity. Tracking Diversity through time by repeating quantitative data collection at sample plot locations has tremendous benefit, as it sheds light on gradual changes that are happening that may go un-noticed in a qualitative view of things.

There are several popular ways to calculate Diversity. We have adopted a common calculation method in field ecology, as it has proven to have benefit for comparing restoration sites and natural communities of similar types and sizes across local landscapes:

Shannon-Weiner Diversity Index

We have adopted what is referred to as the “Exotic Species Importance Value (IV)”, as devised by Gary Fleming at the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Division of Natural Heritage. This index number has proven valuable in creating goals, targets, and measures in restoration projects. It is a quantitative way of measuring and tracking non-native plant species impact across time. This formula combines non-native species richness (# of species) and abundance (% cover) and expresses each as a relative percentage of the total population (including native species). The final number is expressed as a value on a scale of 0-1, with “0” meaning a complete absence of non-native species, and “1” meaning 100% non-native species, and 100% non-native ground cover.

The evolving knowledge frameworks acquired by indigenous and local peoples over time through direct engagement with a local environment. These systems include humans as part of nature, engaging with it directly in responsible and regenerative ways. Also included in these systems are indigenous systems, non-human species, indigenous materials (sediments, rocks, water, for example), and natural disturbance regimes that are an integral part of an environment. Indigenous knowledge systems rely upon a deep, nuanced, and extremely detailed understanding of local environments, the knowledge of which is gained through an interactive and responsive feedback loop tied to day-to-day living as part of a regenerative system.

The totality of living and non-living objects, materials, systems, and processes that exists on the surface of the earth, to include a multitude of real and functional connections and influences imparted by the atmosphere and sun above, and the deep earth below (geologic time). Land is the thin ever-changing skin that is essentially a compilation of continuous phenomena that reflect the relationship that exists between the earth and sky. Living organisms (including humans) are but a small part of land in space-time. Land may be experienced by the human mammal through sight, taste, smell, touch, sound, and other exchanges. Land stretches far beyond these means of detection through uncountable and undetectable connections between its changing parts, at scales and in ways not within easy human perception, and must be considered in more than 3 dimensions, spatially and processually. Land is motion. In many respects land is a space-time fluid. Land in the colonialist context is most often viewed through ownership, and in fact that is the most common overarching lens through which practitioners of landscape architecture will encounter the word within the regulatory/legal/design framework. Since land is an enigmatic fluid in space-time, in motion, can one really own it? Or are we owned by it?

A perception that is limited to human sight (one can reframe it through other senses, but that would be soundscape, tastescape, etc.). Traditionally limited to vision, a landscape is the combination of all visible parts of land as they exist from a specific vantage point in space and time. It has been applied historically through the colonialist perspective of objectivity – aesthetic experience, extractive or productive potential, etc.

Native organisms are those that have evolved in a specific ecological area for long enough to have developed thousands of obvious, and less apparent, complex and specialized relationships with other plants, animals, fungi, and communities of biota. The term “native” is most often prescribed to areas within political lines, but in fact it refers to groupings of plants that are natural to specific areas with unique physiographic and microclimatic conditions. Therefore, a plant that is native to one portion of a landscape may not be native, natural, or adapted to another part of it. This logic should be applied at multiple scales, from ecoregions to individual hills, fields, and boulders. This concept is very important for sustainable conservation practice, and for the support of locally adapted wildlife and the overall integrity of local and regional biodiversity. But, it is also critical for supporting the integrity of environmental education. Native, as a defining tool, should be used with local ecological specificity, and in a niche-based manner. Native species that volunteer in all phases of renewal and succession, are functional native plants… even if they emerge in a sidewalk crack or the gravel of an abandoned lot. Urban lots, suburban lawns, and old agricultural landscapes are teaming with native species, and they always spring forth if a bit of land is allowed to grow (albeit, in competition with non-native exotics that effectively suppress diversity).

Natural community trajectory is a phrase we use to describe the often predictable vegetative potential of any landscape. If left to its own device, and given time, each bit of landscape has a general path of predicatable potentials. In fact, there are only a few types of natural communities that can regenerate without intervention on any given bit of landscape. Landcapes are quite selective and self limiting in that way. What’s more, most of the species that will occur in the emerging ecosystem are highly predictable. The reasons for this are complex, and long-debated and considered by ecologists, especially as it pertains to those generalist species that stretch the edges of predictability. The fact is, vegetative cover forms a continuum of growth across the land, and it changes along gradients that are both gradual and sudden. Because of this, and particularly upon the Eastern Temperate landscape, there are a pile of interesting correlations between different groupings of species and the landscape they gravitate toward. Because of these correlations and their relationships to climate and physiography, the remaining species in a natural community can be predicted with a high degree of confidence once the principle (indicator) species are confirmed. The primary factors that create the relative permanence and predictability are physiographic and climatic. That is, variables such as geologic chemistry, aspect, slope, elevation, land shape, land form, soil moisture and drainage, and geographic position combine to form a powerful selective force on vegetative composition. While individual species may be generalists, occurring across diverse sets of environmental conditions, groupings of plants are tied very strictly to local sets of conditions. There are complicating factors that make determining natural trajectory a challenge, such as history of human activity, relative abundance of non-native species, and the influence of natural succession on vegetation. But, all-in-all, the data proves with regularity that every bit of the Piedmont landscape has a normal, natural community potential, AND this potential is entirely predictable, albeit with ever-present variability existing in the details.

Why is this important? The natural trajectory allows for conservation efforts to aim, with precision, at instigating the vegetative renewal that is natural and normal for a given landscape. Without an understanding of this trajectory at a site, restoration projects are wasteful, less successful, and tend to be artificial with very little net benefit for biodiversity (including animals). A great example of a common practice that has no regard for the natural community trajectory of a landscape is the planting of a “wildflower meadow”. Some call them “meadows-in-can”, and they rely upon showy, near-term aesthetic outcomes, and include performance species, generic mixes, and groupings of flora that have never co-occurred in the wild. For obvious reasons, they fail, and they fall extremely short of all goals related to biodiversity conservation, stewardship, and education.

A periodic, persistent, phenomenon or event that introduces specific changes within a natural environment. Prior to colonialism these regimes existed in perpetuity along with native species and systems so that they shaped and honed most parts of them. Because natural disturbance regimes perpetuate through time in response to stable and regular physiographic, biotic, and climatic conditions and events, they impart heavy pressure on evolution. This results in the emergence of specific morphological and behavioral characteristics in plants and animals. Examples of natural disturbance regimes include wind damage, landslides, flood events, lightning-ignited fires, human-ignited fires, large herds of grazing herbivores, and ice storms. Because most natural communities and the species they support evolved under the influence of natural disturbance regimes, they developed relationships with them. When natural disturbance regimes are prevented or suppressed by modern humans, biodiversity plummets. Like other facets of ecological and cultural decline, natural disturbance regimes have been suppressed by settler-colonialism. One cannot restore natural plant communities or native species in a regenerative manner while also making room for all disturbance regimes that are normal for those systems and species.

Natural Plant Communities are assemblages of interacting plant species that are uniquely associated with a specific landscape niche. The assemblage of species in that context has had time to develop stable and balanced relationships with the living and nonliving parts of the same niche. A natural plant community has either experienced minimal modern human disturbance or has recovered from that disturbance under mostly natural conditions.

The process of natural community investigation and identification presents a paradox and related challenges. While plants and ecosystems often exist as a seemingly continuous gradient across the land, they also occur in groupings that are somewhat predictable. Natural communities are relatively predictable units of measure that are very useful for education and conservation efforts because they form the matrix within which all terrestrial animals interact and reproduce. In fact, we argue that the survival of species in the Piedmont Region is entirely dependent upon the restoration and preservation of natural community diversity and associated natural disturbance regimes.

An Ecological Community is defined as an assemblage of co-existing, interacting species, considered together with the physical environment and associated ecological processes that usually recurs on the landscape. Our research covers both traditional categories of “natural” and “un-natural” ecological communities. Because humans are mammals, and part of nature, we treat all ecological communities as “natural”, despite the level of human disturbance, and consider them to be on a spectrum of recovery from human disturbance. Our work is as much an effort to define degrees of recovery as it is to determine the classification of the system.

No part of the Piedmont landscape has escaped the influence of humans. Human animals are a large, numerous, and ambitious bunch, defined in part as being cosmopolitan – that is, we are found in nearly every corner of the world as a single species. No other lifeform has moved so far, so fast, while leaving a trail of ever-growing progeny and proportional ecological destruction that compounds with each step forward. The cart is way out in front of the horse, so far that we can’t see it or understand the effects our actions will have on future generations.

We have been on the Virginia landscape for more than 15,000 years. However, the heaviest impact on the non-human life of our region has come in the last 500 years – since the first European colonizers reached Turtle Island (the Indigenous name for the continent. The label “North America” is a relic of colonialism). A sizable scattered collection of small, remnant, pre-colonial habitats do remain throughout the region – particularly grasslands of the wetland, prairie, savanna, and woodland types. Most of those are essentially unchanged from their condition prior to the colonial invasion and subsequent settlement, due to being far short of ideal for Euro-centric agricultural production (monocultured non-native plants and animals).

Some habitats in the region have had only a decade or so to recover from the oppressive behaviors of modern humans, and even those continue to be impacted by things like fire suppression. Other habitats are best described as being in a middle successional stages of recovery from agriculture, forest clearing, fire suppression, trail building, or other disturbance events. A few habitats in the region should be considered “old-growth” and nearly intact or fully recovered from post-Columbian disturbance.

It is important to understand that we include human disturbance as part of natural community development, and we aren’t alone. Most modern ecologists now recognize that it is about “how”, rather than “if”, when it comes to the positive or negative impacts of disturbance. It is important to differentiate between the disturbance activities of modern humans and those of Indigenous People. Natural community development does not occur unless humans allow for the natural disturbance regimes that shaped systems, plants, and animals through time. This includes the landscape management practices of Indigenous People, and in our region specifically, those of the Monacan, Mannahoac, Occaneechi, Sapon, and Catawba Indian Nations and their relatives.

Concept propelled by colonialist systems, they include objects and systems, living and nonliving, that came into existence through means not involving humans. These resources are viewed as being there for appropriation and use, for aesthetics, extraction, production, manipulation, industrial endeavors, scientific experiment, consumption, and cultural experiences AND they are most often valued for the degree to which they can result in these things. A restorative view of a natural resource includes valuing those things in their own right, as more-than-human objects and systems that are worthy of existing not as definitions of how they may serve humans. Natural resources are most accurately defined as being inclusive of humans.

We use these three terms interchangeably. They refer to any plant species that is introduced to the region, either purposefully or accidentally, outside its natural and normal ecological range in space and time. We do not use cultural divisions in time to define Nativism for plants, as we hold that the degree of nativism in flora has more to do with the development of complex relationships than it does the culture that moved the plant around. Given that climate oscillations have shaped and honed species and natural community movement and development through time, we hypothesize that nativism in a plant is closely tied to the minimum oscillation time-frame. That length of time is certainly greater than 1,000 years. Any plant shoved into new environments by humans in the last 1,000 years should be deemed as suspect, with respect to being a native plant. Non-native species that perpetuate in growing numbers have demonstrated the tendency to spread to a degree that causes damage to the environment, biological diversity, and often human economy and health. Non-native species are often invasive and aggressive, and compete directly with native species for moisture, sunlight, nutrients, and space. That said, other introduced species naturalize in a quiet manner, and will presumably graduate to the “native plant” status after deep time allows them to work out the multitude of environmental relationships required.

Non-native / Exotic species often invade landscapes that have experienced modern soil disturbance. In that context they face very few (if any) of the normal environmental checks and balances they evolved with, including weather variation, soil bacteria, fungi, and insect pests and diseases that keep them under control in their natural native range. The utter lack of natural enemies often leads to damaging and hard-to-control population eruptions. It is true that most seeds and vegetative materials of non-native species that are introduced purposefully or by accident, do not survive, but those that do tend to be voracious and beyond environmental control. Biodiversity is almost always lower in comparable proportion with the prevalence of exotic species.

When referring to data, it refers to data that is subjective, biased, and dynamic. When referring to inquiry, it is a method of observation that retains the multi-faceted human experience so that the conclusions are descriptive, personal, emotional, and inherently biased by an individual’s perception and degrees of knowledge. This approach is focused on human perception, and is critical for understanding community response to ideas and behavior, and for developing a personal relationship with land that includes caring and sustained stewardship. It is also critical because it leads to inspired thought, new ideas, and novel and meaningful pathways to further research, including quantitative data collection.

Methodology and resulting data that is an expression of the phenomenon being observed, with a focus on recognizing and understanding systems and species for what they are, despite how humans experience them through feeling and abstraction. While individuals in a group of people may all have different accounts of a shared experience, quantitative assessment helps shed light on often overlooked, fixed, and universal phenomena that are critical for seeing, acknowledging, and understanding a species or system. A goal is to minimize bias and abstraction in the interpretation or reading of an object or place. Naturally, a balance between qualitative and quantitative methods is important for any assessment, but each has its place for optimum outcomes in regenerative practice.

An open state of being and persisting, within the context of change, that is free of a reduction of normal and natural diversity, richness, and complexity in living and non-living parts of ecological systems. The state of being regenerative is one in which the complex and integrated relationships that are present are tied to specific places and sets of conditions in time such that organisms, systems, and processes are able to self-assemble, self-regulate, reproduce, and regenerate. Regenerative practice by humans acknowledges that the land and its natural processes and systems form the building blocks of lasting and meaningful design and restoration. It reaches beyond “sustainability” in that it does more than just preventing additional harm – it introduces or enables natural processes that can lead to regeneration and recovery from previous harm.

A conservative, non-weedy native plant species or ecological system that persists on stable landscapes under consistent site conditions and natural disturbance regimes. Remnants may be leftovers of pre-colonial plant groupings that survive on unplowed soils and other stable ground surfaces, or may represent close approximations of pre-colonial groupings and associated site conditions. Where once they were widespread and common, they now only survive as a patchwork of small fragments. Key Characteristics of Remnant Grasslands include: 1) Very diverse (often 70-120 natives per 100m2), 2) Rare and uncommon species are often present in large numbers, 3) Slow-to-assemble groups of plants that aren’t tolerant of soil disturbance, 4) Usually very few non-native exotic species present, and 5) are hypothesized to be left-over fragments of larger old-growth ecosystems. Remnant Old Growth Forests, Grasslands, and Shrublands survive on less than 10% of the eastern temperate landscape due to a long history of land modification and ongoing development and agriculture that does not make room for the preservation of ecological potential. Systems are entirely dependent upon intact old growth soil columns, above all else. An old grassland may persist as a dormant system in a dark-thicket woodland for centuries if natural disturbance regimes are withheld. They are ecological eruptions just waiting for release.

“Richness” refers to the total number of species within a given area. Many natural plant communities have naturally low species richness (such as the forested heath habitats in our region). In the Piedmont, forests tend to have fewer plant species than open-space grassland types such as prairies, savannas, and woodlands. There are a great number of reasons for this, but one worth noting here is that pre-Columbian native landscapes in the region were blanketed by as much grassland as forest. Enormous contiguous grasslands had thousands of years of robust, full sun, species development. One may surmise that the competition for space, nutrients, water, and light there-in resulted in enormous division of species within each Genera (in fact, this bears fruit in Solidago, Dichanthelium, Desmodium and many others). Time compounds this affect, and each taxa of plant fills every little niche of the grassland landscape, both spatially and temporally, with a well-suited species. Species richness is a very important data point for comparing natural communities across the land. In combination with abundance and seasonal change, one may use richness to begin to understand biological health and the potential of a site, regardless of the condition it is in.

A weedy plant species or ecological system that is the first to colonize and grow on disturbed landscapes, wasteland, and debris piles. Disturbance may include natural events that are not human related, such as landslides, flooding, bison wallows and heavily used paths. Ruderal plants and systems grow on heavily disturbed land that has been plowed, pastured, mined, fertilized, sprayed, and/or developed. Once established, ruderal systems may persist for hundreds of years before changing significantly to include a more diverse set of species. Key Characteristics of Ruderal Systems include: 1) Low diversity – often fewer than 25 native species per 100m2, 2) Composed of early successional, weedy species tolerant of disturbance, 3) Usually have a great abundance of non-native exotic species, and 4) Are hypothesized to persist and dominate on disturbed soils for centuries. Ruderal Forests and Ruderal Grasslands and Shrublands constitute perhaps 90% or more of the eastern temperate landscape due to a long history of land modification and ongoing development and agriculture that does not make room for the preservation of ecological potential.

A scientific method that supports restoration through the acknowledgment of ecological systems, living and nonliving parts, and biocultural interactions and processes. This restoration is often performed on lands and within systems in order to rectify degradation or other harm done by modern humans. When done well, restoration ecology embraces and assists the natural trajectory of a landscape so that it may approach characteristics that are regenerative and human-inclusive. Restoration ecology is essentially an historic/prehistoric field of practice that has been employed by Indigenous People for thousands of years, but brought into the framework of modern scientific practice and policy (in both appropriated and responsible ways), and done in consideration of a rapidly changing climate and new ecological pressures generated by modern humans and colonialism. However, it is not to be conflated with Indigenous Knowledge Systems, which are built on deep place-based living and local communication frameworks.

Rewilding is a comprehensive, often large-scale, conservation effort focused on restoring sustainable biodiversity and ecosystem health by protecting core wild/wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and highly interactive species (keystone species).The ultimate goal of rewilding efforts is to mitigate the species extinction crisis and restore healthy and sustainable ecosystem function in areas that require little or no human intervention or management. Rewilding efforts generally share a vision of dynamic but stable self-regulating and self-sustaining ecosystems with near pre-human levels of species diversity. John Davis observed that “Rewilding, in essence, is giving the land back to wildlife, and wildlife back to the land.” (from rewilding.org)

Often understood in relation to IKS (Indigenous Knowledge Systems). The knowledge generated through the scientific method, involving a) asking a specific ecological question, b) doing background research of others that have investigated the same question, c) the construction of a hypothesis, and d) testing that hypothesis with an experiment. This process within ecology generates a feedback loop with the results informing new questions, and these questions in turn mature to reflect an understanding of an environment. It creates powerful information for analyzing and understanding environmental conditions, but it does not ensure that responsible and regenerative actions follow. When the scientific method is applied within the framework of indigenous knowledge systems, scientific ecological knowledge can find its place in helping achieve restorative and sustainable solutions for ecological and cultural systems. In reality, it may be the case that there is no such thing as a combination of the two strategies, as their ideal combination is simply the first system: Indigenous Knowledge System.

This term is often used to describe a phenomenon that is observed in Natural Plant Community regeneration and recovery following ground disturbance. Self-assembly is the normal process of a plant colonizing a land surface on its own through the assistance of water, wind, gravity, or *non-human dispersal agents that are integral parts of the local ecosystem (e.g., birds). We are careful to state here that the exclusion of humans from this definition is not meant to suggest that humans aren’t part of systems. For the acknowledgement of the current status and type of natural communities and the vegetative trajectory of a landscape, it is important to understand where plants choose to grow despite our tendency to force them into new spaces. Self-assembly in native plants shows us a multitude of specific adaptations to climatic and physiographic conditions, as well as natural disturbance regimes. Self-assembled flora are critical for beginning to see the natural trajectory of a landscape that is recovering from disturbance, and of particular importance in design and restoration. The differences between human-designed and engineered assemblages of native plants and self-assembled communities of plants are almost always large, unfortunately. By respecting indigenous plant self-assembly, and not only making room for it, but assisting it through the application of local ecological knowledge, great amounts of time and resources can be saved and outcomes can approach being regenerative in character while supporting local genotype biodiversity. Self-assembly is very important in conservation, as old growth ecosystems that have survived the impacts of colonialism are recognized, in-part, because of the preponderance of densely-growing, diverse, self-assembled local native plants.

Generally, succession describes patterns of change in species composition or community structure through time. Traditionally this was associated with the linear trajectory of vegetation from a “barren”, ”open” condition – dominated by generalist/opportunistic species (“pioneer” species, generally short-lived) – towards a “climax community” (more conservative species, longer -lived, archetypically a “forest”). This view of succession is still pervasive – and useful in some cases – but has been largely debunked in ecology in favor of models which acknowledge communities as existing within dynamic landscape mosaic where community trajectories are non-linear and disturbance plays an important role. Traditional succession metaphors also exhibit a bias towards forested landscapes as “ideal” (related to the co-evolution of ecology and state forestry science, especially in Northern Europe), failing to understand that grasslands and other “open” landscapes are equally complex and not necessarily “younger” than landscapes with trees.

The state of being in balance through time, even if the balance is defined by consistent or chaotic change. It says nothing of health, condition, or of regenerative ability. Most things described as “sustainable” are very temporary. Since nothing is permanent, including various states of balance, the word and concept of “sustainable” may not actually be possible. Perhaps it is a term that is a shallow attempt to re-label or re-frame another more applicable concept or term?