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Alpine ecosystems are under increasing pressure from land‐use change and road construction, resulting in habitat fragmentation and declines in biodiversity and ecosystem function. Ecosystem restoration can mitigate the impacts from human land‐use change by assisting the recovery of natural ecosystems. We developed an assessment framework using established international standards and monitored alpine vegetation recovery within restored zones along a hydropower‐dam road built in 2013 in the Knutshø landscape protected area, Norway. Using data collected in 2016, 2018 and 2021, we compared abiotic variables and vegetation indicators (cover, and community composition) in restored zones against directly adjacent intact zones within three different habitat types. After eight years, wetland habitat had similar cover of plant functional types and abiotic variables within restored and intact zones, while ridge and willow‐heath habitats had more cover of graminoids and less cover of shrubs in restored compared to intact zones. In addition, community composition in restored wetland habitat zones was similar to intact zones, while the community composition of restored zones in ridge and willow‐heath habitats was significantly different from adjacent intact zones. This suggests that restored wetland habitat in our study system is on a trajectory of recovery, but that recovery of other plant community types may require longer periods of time or, in some cases, may not be possible without further intervention because of alternative stable states. Our results underscore the need for long‐term monitoring and adaptive management to insure restoration success in alpine environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is resulting in a rapid expansion of shrubs in the Arctic. This expansion has been shown to be reinforced by positive feedbacks, and it could thus set the ecosystem on a trajectory toward an alternate, more productive regime. Herbivores, on the other hand, are known to counteract the effects of simultaneous climate warming on shrub biomass. However, little is known about the impact of herbivores on resilience of these ecosystems, that is, the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still remain in the same regime, retaining the same function, structure, and feedbacks. Here, we investigated how herbivores affect resilience of shrub-dominated systems to warming by studying the change of shrub biomass after a cessation of long-term experimental warming in a forest-tundra ecotone. As predicted, warming increased the biomass of shrubs, and in the absence of herbivores, shrub biomass in tundra continued to increase 4 years after cessation of the artificial warming, indicating that positive effects of warming on plant growth may persist even over a subsequent colder period. Herbivores contributed to the resilience of these systems by returning them back to the original low-biomass regime in both forest and tundra habitats. These results support the prediction that higher shrub biomass triggers positive feedbacks on soil processes and microclimate, which enable maintaining the rapid shrub growth even in colder climates. Furthermore, the results show that in our system, herbivores facilitate the resilience of shrub-dominated ecosystems to climate warming., (© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)