Restoration ecology as a normative discipline is characterized by recommendations from scientists and quantifying the effectiveness of various methodologies. However, rarely has there been an exploration of when and why practitioners actually apply recommendations, or whether profiles of “successful” practitioners differ. To address these questions, we used a case study of invasive tree removal projects in the American southwest, analyzing data from 244 sites where the exotic tree Tamarix spp. was removed using various different methods. Mixed (quantitative and qualitative) data were collected from the managers responsible for 93% of these sites to determine whether there were identifiable groups based on manager characteristics, project-specific characteristics, general management decisions, or project-specific decisions. To do this, we ran cluster analyses on their answers to standardized questions using Gower’s similarity coefficient and the Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) method.
Results/Conclusions
We found that whom the manager worked for (i.e., which agency) and which agencies owned, managed, and did the hiring for a project were primary distinguishing features, appearing to influence project goals, methodologies, and resulting plant community. In contrast to other published works, we did not find that either education or attitude toward science was a driving variable. Furthermore, our results suggest that managers of Tamarix removal projects are following scientists’ recommendations for this system, utilizing multiple means of monitoring and aligning project goals with site condition. This research may thus represent a success story for the role of science in restoration, while providing a broadly-applicable multivariate method to evaluate mixed data from surveys.