Natural Ecological Restoration: Principles and Practices
This course is based on Living on the Edge: A Manual for the Restoration of Drastically Disturbed Sites, the handbook David F. Polster developed from his restoration work and teaching. Nathan Polster organized the original material into ten online lessons and created the section quizzes. David's lesson content remains intact.
The course starts with a practical question: what is preventing this site from recovering? Once that constraint is understood, a treatment can be chosen to remove it or give natural recovery a place to begin. That way of reading a site runs through the entire course.
What the course covers
- How ecosystems develop: the roles of climate, geology and living organisms, and how they interact.
- Why recovery stalls: erosion, compaction, adverse chemistry, herbivory, competition and other filters that can keep a disturbed site from moving forward.
- How plant communities assemble: succession, safe sites, priority effects, facilitation and resilience.
- Ways to restart natural recovery: rough and loose surface preparation, establishment from seed or rooted plants, and vegetative methods.
- Soil bioengineering: how living plant material can be used to stabilize slopes, banks, gullies and wet ground.
- Working considerations: plant-material procurement, contracting, community involvement and the practical limits of restoration work.
- Monitoring: following successional change, ecosystem function, soil development, structure and resilience rather than relying on cover alone.
The soil bioengineering section introduces wattle fences, live pole drains, brush layers, live staking, live smiles, live reinforced earth walls, live shade, live palisades, pocket and joint planting, live gully breaks and live silt fences. They are presented as tools to match to site conditions, not as standard details to apply everywhere.
Course format
The ten lessons follow the sequence of the handbook, from ecosystem composition and degradation through natural solutions, operational considerations and monitoring. Each lesson is followed by a short quiz.
The ten online lessons contain the course material and follow the sequence of the 113-page Living on the Edge handbook. Each lesson is followed by a short quiz, and course access is provided through the learner hub for online reading.
Who the course is for
The material is intended for people who assess, plan, build or monitor restoration work: environmental consultants, reclamation practitioners, land managers, biologists, engineers, contractors, stewardship groups and students. Examples are drawn from mines, industrial disturbances, unstable slopes, riparian areas and other sites where simply adding vegetation does not address the reason recovery has stalled.
About the material
This is David Polster's course. It reflects his explanations, field methods and working approach. PES and Nathan Polster now make it available online and carry the work forward.
The course does not replace a site investigation, professional judgment or project-specific engineering. Hydrology, substrate, slope, available plant material, season and the consequences of failure still need to be considered on every site.