Restoration is globally implemented to improve ecosystem condition but often without tracking treatment expenditures relative to ecological outcomes. We evaluated the cost-effectiveness of widely-conducted woody and invasive plant removal and seeding treatments spanning 14 years to determine how land managers can optimize restoration efforts.
Results/Conclusions
Enhancement of perennial grass cover to meet several objectives was driven by the type and costs of treatments. Although seeding bolstered perennial grass cover, vegetation removal cost had a larger effect on this outcome than seeding cost. Among vegetation removal treatments, relatively inexpensive herbicide application had a large effect on increasing seeded species that was enhanced by additional cost; while expensive woody mastication treatments had little effect regardless of additional cost. Seed cost was not strongly associated with outcome because higher seed cost was driven by the inclusion of expensive native species in seed mixes, which was not tied to substantial increases in perennial grass cover. Our results suggest the differential benefit of treatments to competitively release recovering perennial grasses and improvements to increase native species recovery in water-limited regions. Given the growing need and cost of restoration, we raise the importance of specifying treatment budgets and objectives, coupled with effectiveness monitoring, to improve restoration.