My native plant friend has a rant I've heard twice and I gather he's given countless times.
The logistics of a wetland restoration are that you get a lump of money to get a group to go out and stick plants in the ground, but the problem is that in an intact habitat plants compliment each other. Some won't grow next to tall plants, others will only grow next to tall plants. So a restoration should ideally be a series of planting events over three or four years, but that's either not 'sexy' enough for the financial and public policy people, or doesn't have the sense of closure they're chasing.
Mass tree plantings aren't fundamentally different, and doing mass anything means disturbing the soil. The current wisdom is that there's a point of no return with soil compaction, where if you cross it, there are only two solutions: One is to raise the surface area of the soil to increase the distance, the other is is to wait for the next ice age to scrape it all up and precipitate it back out. Those compaction layers also affect the flow of groundwater, so building upward only solves part of your problem. And it's heavy work, so you're again tromping the ecosystem you're trying to save.
The moral of the story is that if you disturb an area and end up with 90% dead trees, you may have done more harm than good.
I've been doing this to my lawn (central Texas): putting in a turf varietal of the native Texas Buffalo grass. This year, we had a 5ish month drought with a couple months of 105° daytime temps. My Buffalo went dormant; all of my neighbors' Bermuda died: the soil temp went too high for it. Soil temp death is something I've been warning people about for years.
It started raining, again, a couple weeks ago: my lawn is a lush, bright green, native surface (with Butterflies, again!); the rest of the street is gray mush.
The logistics of a wetland restoration are that you get a lump of money to get a group to go out and stick plants in the ground, but the problem is that in an intact habitat plants compliment each other. Some won't grow next to tall plants, others will only grow next to tall plants. So a restoration should ideally be a series of planting events over three or four years, but that's either not 'sexy' enough for the financial and public policy people, or doesn't have the sense of closure they're chasing.
Mass tree plantings aren't fundamentally different, and doing mass anything means disturbing the soil. The current wisdom is that there's a point of no return with soil compaction, where if you cross it, there are only two solutions: One is to raise the surface area of the soil to increase the distance, the other is is to wait for the next ice age to scrape it all up and precipitate it back out. Those compaction layers also affect the flow of groundwater, so building upward only solves part of your problem. And it's heavy work, so you're again tromping the ecosystem you're trying to save.
The moral of the story is that if you disturb an area and end up with 90% dead trees, you may have done more harm than good.