The Humpty-Dumpty Effect

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Below is the summary I wrote to go along with this illustration of a scientific paper, titled An eco-evolutionary perspective on the humpty-dumpty effect and community restoration:

Why is it so hard to fix broken ecosystems? This Forum paper seeks to improve our idea of the “humpty-dumpty effect” that is often invoked to explain restoration failure. Reassembling an ecosystem is more complicated than putting puzzle pieces back together when the "pieces" have changed in size (population size) or shape (species traits), according to the authors of the study. Using this puzzle-piece concept, the authors evaluate 271 efforts to restore fragmented ecosystems. They describe examples where restoration failure seems to have resulted from changes in size, shape, or both. Their paper concludes with a checklist of five recommendations as a starting point to help future restoration efforts “more successfully put the ecological community pieces together again.”

More of my ecological illustrations and summaries: https://www.oikosjournal.org/forum.