Ecological Restoration

Fungi in ecological restoration

In 2009, I co-founded and directed the Northwest Indiana Restoration Monitoring Inventory (NIRMI, www.nirmi.org), an ecological monitoring and educational program focused on urban, suburban, and near-industrial sites mainly in NW Indiana but also in NE Illinois and SW Michigan. NIRMI provides a data-driven and open-access approach to determining the restoration trajectory of over 50 restoration locations in a region considered to be simultaneously an ecological wonderland and wasteland.

As a mycologist helping to keep an eye on a region’s restoration means also that I have challenged the field of ecological restoration to consider fungi by providing clear data-driven guidance on how to do that. In brief, this study indicates that monitoring fungal parameters can add valuable insights on the trajectory of restorations:

Avis P.G., Gaswick WC, Tonkovich GS, Leacock PR. 2017. Monitoring fungi in ecological restorations of coastal Indiana, USA. Restoration Ecology. 25(1):92-100.

To provide additional ways for ecologists as well as restoration practitioners, I have developed ways to capture mature forest ectomycorrhizal fungi on tree seedlings as an alternative to more standard approaches that have resulted in seedlings colonized by weedier species of fungi:

Avis, P.G., Meier, I. and Phillips, R. 2017. An Intact Soil Core Bioassay for Cultivating Forest Ectomycorrhizal Fungal Communities. In M. Lukac, P. Grenni & M. Gamboni (eds.), pp. 173-190. Soil biological communities and ecosystem resilience, Springer.

Restoration Monitoring

From 2018 to 2021, my students and I collaborated with Audubon Great Lakes to conduct habitat surveys of hemi-marsh critical for sensitive birds and wetland restoration. https://greatlakesbirds-audubon.hub.arcgis.com/