Rehabilitation Ecology by Revegetation: Approach and Results from Two Mediterranean Countries

Arnaud Martin, Carla Khater, Herve Mineau, Suzette Puech
2002 The Korean Journal of Ecology  
Human activities greatly affect the environment causing its degradation. Urban development and road networks construction cause main impacts on ecosystems and particularly on vegetation cover: road constructions induce complete degradation of the vegetation cover and often leaves a bare land, sometimes without even a soil cover. Reconstitution of vegetation cover is necessary to limit superficial erosion and land slipping on the road, towards a reintegration of the site in the neighbouring
more » ... cape. Many approaches have been studied over the last 30 years aiming at this reconstitution of vegetation cover. At first, the main purpose of land reclamation was to create a new ecosystem. At this time, the environment c reated was rather a "garden" with a new soil adapted to the plantation of "decorative" species. Then, in early 90's many studies on the restoration ecology concept rather focused on adapting the vegetation to the existing conditions on the site, as in a side road embankment for example. Nowadays, we notice a large tendency towards the use of such adapted native species instead of industrially produced seeds. In southern France, our team have led research on the potentials of those local species for their use in revegetation processes with hydro-seeding. We therefore developed an approach combining the use of different types of species: Industrially produced, native and wild cultivated species. This method integrates the benefits of using available low costing seeds that are already used on large scale projects with better adapted species, issued form the cultivation of native species and seed production for their use on smaller scale and more costly but more effective results. The use of wild cultivated species seeds was developed in order to limit the cost and reduce harsh natural seed withdrawal in the natural environment in the case of the use of native species. Besides, the use of such seeds allowed a larger geographical scale of use than with local native seeds.
doi:10.5141/jefb.2002.25.1.009 fatcat:2lkrytr7v5bn5k6q6tio3sxfkm