PLoS ONE 4, e5653 (2009)

Ecosystems damaged by human activities such as agriculture and oil spills may be quicker to recover than was thought. Rather than taking centuries, or even millennia, to convalesce, Holly Jones and Oswald Schmitz at Yale University found that even severely damaged ecosystems could recover within decades.

The duo reviewed 240 independent scientific studies conducted between 1910 and 2008 that examined the recovery of large ecosystems from damaging human activities and natural disturbances such as hurricanes. They discovered that the longest average recovery time — found to be taken by forest ecosystems — was no more than 56 years. Deep-ocean ecosystems took only about 5 years.