What does the recovery debt really measure?

Abstract

Recently, Moreno-Mateos et al. (2017) coined the concept ‘recovery debt’, clearly a close relative of the ecosystem service debt (Isbell et al. 2015), and gave it significance as “the interim reduction of biodiversity and biogeochemical functions occurring during ecosystem recovery”. Using rather impressive dataset consisting 3,035 sampling plots worldwide as an example, they analysed the recovery debt for plant and animal species diversity and abundance as well as for carbon and nitrogen cycling. Based on their analysis Moreno-Mateos et al.  conclude that “… recovering and restored ecosystems have less abundance, diversity and cycling of carbon and nitrogen than ‘undisturbed’ ecosystems …”. Here, we scrutinize the proposed new concept and point out problems in conclusions resulting from the operationalization of the concept.

Keywords

• biodiversity
• ecosystem function
• recovery debt
• r