Restoring Ecosystems in a Time of Ongoing Global Change

Two women peering at tableware in the Resetting The Table exhibit

March 23, 2022
David Moreno Mateos, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Affiliate of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

How long does it take for an ecosystem to recover after it is disturbed or destroyed by human activities? How do we know when an ecosystem has recovered? In this lecture, restoration ecologist David Moreno Mateos will discuss the traditional methods used to assess the recovery of terrestrial ecosystems—such as changes in biodiversity or soil carbon levels—and highlight their limitations. He will make a case for more comprehensive and long-term approaches to understanding and measuring ecosystem recovery and highlight their potential for enhancing environmental policies and large-scale restoration strategies.

This program is supported by the Michael V. Dyett Lecture Fund.

About the Speaker

David Moreno Mateos is a restoration ecologist interested in understanding the long-term recovery of ecosystems degraded by human development. His research aims to estimate how long it takes for ecosystems to recover their less resilient attributes such as the interactions among soil organisms and plants. Better understanding these processes will enable the development of new tools that increase the currently limited performance of ecosystem restoration and increase ecological understanding of landscape architecture. He works on areas degraded by human activities, agricultural fields or mines, abandoned centuries ago. Some of these field sites are the forests of New England, recovering from European settlement agriculture for about 200 years, and Southwest Greenland, where Norse sites have been recovering from ancient agriculture for more than 650 years.


David holds a PhD from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Alcalá, both in Madrid with honors (equivalent to summa cum laude) in 2008. After this, he spent three years at the University of California at Berkeley, two years at Stanford University, and one year at the Centre National de la Recherché Scientific (CNRS) in Montpellier, France. During the last five years, he was at the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) near Bilbao, Spain, as an Ikerbasque and Ramon y Cajal research fellow. David has authored more than forty papers in scientific journals and books, including papers in Nature CommunicationsNaturePLOS Biology, and Nature Ecology and Evolution. He is associate editor in Journal of Applied Ecology (British Ecological Society) and Ecological Restoration (Society for Ecological Restoration).