Carters Smith News Today

Tender shoots of restoration plantings are ‘irresistible little treats for grazers’

Re-establishing plantings of trees, grasses and other vegetation is essential for restoring degraded ecosystems, but a new survey of almost 2,600 restoration projects from nearly every type of ecosystem on Earth finds that most projects fail to recognize and control one of the new plants’ chief threats: hungry critters that eat plants. “In the early stages, these plants are like lollipops — irresistible little treats for grazers,” said a Duke researcher who co-led the project.