Designing restoration strategies: Using functional traits of plants species as both benchmarks and builders of soil conditions and plant communities

Plant-soil interactions are the foundation of ecosystem restoration, and plant traits are a strong predictor of plants effects on, and responses to soil conditions. Traits such as phenology, rooting depth, mycorrhizal status, and tissue nutrient ratios often reflect the resource conditions required for successful reestablishment of desired plant species. These provide specific targets for soil restoration, including the chemical forms, supply rates, and spatial and temporal distributions of multiple resources. At the same time,  plant traits also impact these characteristics of soil resources, and thus can be manipulated to shape the soil. By combining the frameworks that use traits to predict plant effects on, and plant responses to soil conditions, a successional approach to restoration can be designed to improve the success of restoration efforts. This approach uses traits to select for intermediary species that can both flourish under the current conditions and alter these conditions to favor the establishment of the desired native community.