Advances in the research of ecological effects of vegetation restoration

Vegetation plays an important role in soil and water conservation,carbon sequestration process in ecosystem.Vegetation restoration always use ecological principle to restore biological diversity and ecosystem function through existed vegetation protection,forest enclosure,artificial vegetation(forest,shrubbery and grass) planting and rehabilitation or reconstruction of destructed forests.Nowadays,Natural and artificial restoration of vegetation is considered as one of the most effective approaches to improve ecosystem health.Vegetation can greatly influence above-ground plant community structure and diversity during restoration process.Meanwhile,it can impact the properties of the below-ground ecosystem via enhancing litter and root input;increasing soil nutrients accumulation,improve soil physical structure and enhancing soil microbial biomass and activity during vegetation restoration process.This paper reviewed the effects of vegetation types and restoration times on plant community composition and diversity,soil physicochemical properties and soil microbial community during natural and artificial vegetation restoration.Both natural and artificial vegetation restoration could increase plant diversity.The composition of plant community is different on different restoration stages and the diversity would increase as restoration time increasing.However,unreasonable artificial vegetation restoration under specific environments would induce vegetation degradation and plant diversity decreasing.Different vegetation types have different impacts on soil physicochemical and microbial properties because of their different growth patterns.As restoration time increasing,soil physicochemical and microbial properties show an initial increasing at early stage and reach a stable status at late stage.According to the previous researches about vegetation restoration,we advised that more attention should be paid on comparative studies to investigate the effects of environmental condition,vegetation species and restoration approach during vegetation restoration processes in the future.In addition,the effects of vegetation restoration should be examined in larger spatial scale considering most existed studies were conducted in local scale.Finally,since the above and below ground linkages and behind mechanisms have become important issues in soil science research,such conception should be incorporated into the researches about effects of vegetation restoration.