Ecosystem Restoration (Resource Management Strategy)

Ecosystem restoration improves the condition of California’s modified natural landscapes and biological communities to provide for their sustainability and for their use and enjoyment by current and future generations. Few, if any, of California’s ecosystems can be fully restored to their pre-development condition.  Instead, efforts focus on rehabilitation of important elements of ecosystem structure and function.

Successful restoration increases the diversity of native species and biological communities and the abundance of habitats and connections between them. This can include reproducing natural flows in streams and rivers, curtailing the discharge of waste and toxic contaminants into water bodies, controlling non-native invasive plant and animal species, removing barriers to fish migration in rivers and streams, and recovering wetlands so that they can store floodwater, recharge aquifers, filter pollutants, and provide habitat.