Holly Jones

What does restoration mean to me? This is a strongly philosophical question among academics but I think it’s simpler than we’d have people believe. It’s helping an ecosystem or species thrive, most often after it has been damaged. #iRestore

I study how small mammals respond to tallgrass prairie restoration and how island soils, plants, and spiders are impacted by seabird recovery or restoration on islands. #iRestore

How #iRestore? I rely on the incredibly dedicated practitioners to do the restoring. I measure small mammal responses with a live capture-mark-recapture study design and use isotopes to quantify their niche breadth. I use isotopes to track seabird influence to island food webs.

What we don’t know? A whole lot more than we do. We don’t understand the complex relationships between species or function well enough to truly recreate ecosystems. We don’t know when restoration works better than passive recovery in most cases. #iRestore.

But we are also a new discipline and still have a ton to learn! iRestore

Goals? Vary by project. My research goals are to help prioritize where and when restoration works best, and document impacts of management on entire food webs because though plants are the base, the rest of the food web is just as important and understudied. #iRestore

So many collaborators to shout out for #iRestore! @BarberEcology is my closest prairie confidant. Students are the engines of my research program @PetrelStation @lyndsayrankin @wailscn @ExplorerWieteke @HHerakovich @NickSteijn @wild_ecology and many others not on Twitter.

Favorite conference experience is tough. Probably #ESA2018 when @BarberEcology @DavidJohnGibson and I organized a symposium on functional and phylogenetic diversity in grassland communities. The quick ignite talks were a blast and meeting the speakers was great. #iRestore

Heather has it right for best prairie weather. https://twitter.com/hherakovich/status/1140234140350132224?s=21 … For islands it’s low swells and wind. Night rain/cloud cover is good for seabirds and prairie smammals. #iRestore

Favorite field site is NOT easy. Hauturu Island, where the New Zealand storm petrel was rediscovered breeding after rat and cat eradication is majestic. It has kākāpō, tuatara, kiwi, kōkako, and heaps of other incredible creatures. Helping band NZ stormies = magical. #iRestore

My favorite piece of lab equipment is our mass spectrometer. We get d15N, d13C, total N and total C out of 1 sample. It helps elucidate bison diet, plant physiology, and smammal niche width #iRestore

Fave field story? When I was working in the Aleutians for USFWS trialing rat eradication techniques, we worked in the Bay of Islands. Home base was Adak Island. Most of us were learning how to drive skiffs. In the Bering Sea. Which is cold. And swelly. #iRestore

I had worked on Anacapa Island in the Channel Islands so was reasonably good at jumping from a skiff onto an island. Which was good because we worked on many islands in the Bay of Islands, many of which we had to jump onto from the skiff. #iRestore

So one day one of my fellow teammates was driving and I was jumping. He was just learning to drive and it’s pretty intimidating. You have to find a reasonable place to let someone off. You have to time the swell. #iRestore

You have to motor forward and quick flip to reverse so you don’t crash the boat and high center it on the rocks as the swell goes down. Well, he got 2/3 of those right. But not the first one. I should never have jumped, folks!! #iRestore

Do you know how much upper body strength you have to have to pull yourself out of the ocean into a skiff?!? I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it. It’s a good thing these were my rock climbing days. I eventually, with the help of the crew, got back into the boat. #iRestore

Best lesson I’ve learned in restoration and science generally is that the juiciest insights come when you are surprised. When your hypothesis isn’t supported. When your results are unexpected. #iRestore