Ecología de la restauración en México: estado actual y perspectivas

Restoration ecology is a scientific discipline which develops principles to guide the restoration of ecosystems based in ecological theory. The objective of this review is to synthetize the current situation and the perspective of the restoration ecology in Mexico and the challenge of this area of research given the environmental conditions in our country. A review of different indicators as scientific publications, meetings, institutions, researchers and the offer of academic programs was carried out. This review resulted in a total of 206 articles from which 78% were research articles (1995-2016), 18% opinions or methodological proposals and 4% were meta-analyses. In 82% of the publications, the first authors were working at a Mexican institution and from them, 57% were men and 43% women. The studies on forest ecosystems represented 71% and the principal topic was the recovery of woody species. The evaluation showed that some indicators increased whereas other stayed constant. The results showed that the academic offer was not enough; the need of a national scientific policy of restoration and long-term sources of funding is discussed.