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Limited funding is a major barrier to implementing ambitious global restoration commitments, so reducing restoration costs is essential to upscale restoration. The lack of rigorous ...analyses about the major components and drivers of restoration costs limit the development of alternatives to reduce costs and the selection of the most cost-effective methods to achieve restoration goals. We conducted detailed restoration cost assessments for the three most widespread biomes in Brazil (Amazon, Cerrado, and Atlantic Forest) and estimated the restoration costs associated with implementing Brazil’s National Plan for Native Vegetation Recovery (12M hectares). Most surveys (60–90%) reported using the costly methods of planting seedlings or sowing seeds throughout the site, regardless of the biome. Natural regeneration and assisted regeneration approaches were an order of magnitude cheaper but were reported in <15% of projects. The vast majority of tree planting and direct seeding costs were incurred during the implementation phase, and nearly 80% of projects ended maintenance within 30 months. We estimated a price tag of US$0.7-1.2 billion per year until 2030 to implement Brazil’s restoration plan depending on the area that recovers through natural regeneration. Our results offer valuable insights for developing strategies to make restoration cheaper and to increase its cost-effectiveness for achieving diverse benefits in Brazilian ecosystems. Our survey also provides a starting point for sound assessments of restoration costs and their drivers in other biomes, which are needed to reduce the financial barriers to scaling up restoration at a global scale.
Examining the science of stream restoration, Rebecca Lave argues that the neoliberal emphasis on the privatization and commercialization of knowledge has fundamentally changed the way that science is ...funded, organized, and viewed in the United States.Stream restoration science and practice is in a startling state. The most widely respected expert in the field, Dave Rosgen, is a private consultant with relatively little formal scientific training. Since the mid-1990s, many academic and federal agency-based scientists have denounced Rosgen as a charlatan and a hack. Despite this, Rosgen's Natural Channel Design approach, classification system, and short-course series are not only accepted but are viewed as more legitimate than academically produced knowledge and training. Rosgen's methods are now promoted by federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, as well as by resource agencies in dozens of states.Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Lave demonstrates that the primary cause of Rosgen's success is neither the method nor the man but is instead the assignment of a new legitimacy to scientific claims developed outside the academy, concurrent with academic scientists' decreasing ability to defend their turf. What is at stake in the Rosgen wars, argues Lave, is not just the ecological health of our rivers and streams but the very future of environmental science.
International forest landscape restoration commitments have promoted the restoration of millions of hectares of degraded and deforested lands globally, but few forest restoration approaches provide ...both ecologically‐sound and financially‐viable solutions for achieving the spatial scale proposed. One potential revenue source for restoration is selective harvesting of timber, a product for which there is a clear global market and increasing demand. The use of commercially valuable exotic trees may attract farmers to restoration, but can be a major concern for ecologists.
Here, we present results collected over 7 years from experimental studies at three sites across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest to assess the impacts of incorporating exotic eucalypts as a transitional stage in tropical forest restoration on above‐ground biomass accumulation, native woody species regeneration and financial viability.
Biomass accumulation was nine times greater in mixed eucalypt‐native species plantations than native only plantings due to fast eucalypt growth. Nonetheless, the growth of native non‐pioneer trees was not affected or only slightly reduced by eucalypts prior to logging.
Eucalypts did not negatively affect the natural regeneration of native woody species before or after eucalypt logging. Canopy cover regrew quickly but was slightly lower a year following logging in mixed eucalypt‐native species plantations. Natural regeneration richness and planted non‐pioneer growth were similar across treatments in the post‐logging period. We found higher variation of biomass accumulation and native species regeneration among sites than between plantation types within sites.
The income from eucalypt wood production offset 44%–75% of restoration implementation costs.
Synthesis and applications. Many of the negative effects attributed to eucalypts on the growth and natural regeneration of native trees depend on features of the production system, landscape structure, soil, and climate in which they are grown, rather than the effects of eucalypts per se. In Brazil's Atlantic Forest region, exotic eucalypts can become important allies of tropical forest restoration, and their use and investment opportunities should be considered within the portfolio of options supported by public and private funding and policies.
Many of the negative effects attributed to eucalypts on the growth and natural regeneration of native trees depend on features of the production system, landscape structure, soil, and climate in which they are grown, rather than the effects of eucalypts per se. In Brazil's Atlantic Forest region, exotic eucalypts can become important allies of tropical forest restoration, and their use and investment opportunities should be considered within the portfolio of options supported by public and private funding and policies.
Ecological restoration is practiced worldwide as a direct response to the degradation and destruction of ecosystems. In addition to its ecological impact it has enormous potential to improve ...population health, socioeconomic well‐being, and the integrity of diverse national and ethnic cultures. In recognition of the critical role of restoration in ecosystem health, the United Nations (UN) declared 2021–2030 as the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. We propose six practical strategies to strengthen the effectiveness and amplify the work of ecological restoration to meet the aspirations of the Decade: (1) incorporate holistic actions, including working at effective scale; (2) include traditional ecological knowledge (TEK); (3) collaborate with allied movements and organizations; (4) advance and apply soil microbiome science and technology; (5) provide training and capacity‐building opportunities for communities and practitioners; and (6) study and show the relationships between ecosystem health and human health. We offer these in the hope of identifying possible leverage points and pathways for collaborative action among interdisciplinary groups already committed to act and support the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Collectively, these six strategies work synergistically to improve human health and also the health of the ecosystems on which we all depend, and can be the basis for a global restorative culture.
The present and future of grassland restoration Török, Péter; Brudvig, Lars A.; Kollmann, Johannes ...
Restoration ecology,
April 2021, 2021-04-00, 20210401, Volume:
29, Issue:
S1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Grasslands contribute greatly to biodiversity and human livelihoods; they support 70% of the world's agricultural area, but are heavily degraded by human land use. Grassland restoration research and ...management receives less attention than forests or freshwater habitats, although grasslands are critical for sustaining ecosystems multifunctionality and capacity to support biodiversity. In this article, we introduce a Special Issue which considers major trends and prospects in grassland restoration. We identified three key topics: First, restoration must confront widespread seed and site limitations, and new monitoring methods, including remote sensing techniques, are critical for restoration projects. Second, we highlight that restored grasslands typically require ongoing disturbance management and that research is required to determine optimal approaches for implementing this management during restoration. Third, global and regional restoration agendas should be harmonized with site‐level goals, and syntheses of current knowledge and research needs must guide grassland restoration across scales. We also identify research gaps to be filled, and challenges which grasslands face in the future: (1) a need for careful target vegetation selection and climate‐adaptive restoration; (2) lack of knowledge in dynamics and restoration of several regions and grassland types, including drylands and (sub)tropical regions; (3) increased importance of species arrival sequence, and high stochasticity of species establishment; and finally (4) issues of post‐restoration management to guarantee long‐term sustainability of restored sites. A new generation of research and restoration projects to bridge these gaps is necessary to mitigate environmental challenges spanning localities to the globe as we commence the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
For restoration to be an effective strategy to reverse large‐scale habitat loss and land degradation, funding programs need policies that promote selection of and commitment to projects that can ...reasonably be expected to succeed. Programmatic project selection practices have received minimal formal evaluation, despite their importance. In this study, we considered the extent to which a program needs to consider both ecological and organizational factors during project selection in order to minimize the incidence of project failure. Our assessment of a long‐term program that funds ecological restoration efforts across Minnesota (U.S.A.), based on project records, manager surveys, and field surveys, yielded several broadly relevant insights. First, factors well understood to confer ecological resilience (level of landscape alteration and starting condition) were clearly associated with restoration outcomes, regardless of time‐since‐initiation of restoration. Second, restoration of low‐resilience ecosystems is typically a labor‐ and skill‐intensive enterprise for organizations that undertake them. Our analysis revealed four organizational limitations, in addition to insufficient funds, that hindered capacity to keep projects on‐track: lack of planning and goal‐setting, inadequate staffing, leadership change, and incomplete records. Third, to reduce risk, programs do not necessarily need to avoid challenging projects, but do need to consider whether organizations proposing restorations have adequate internal capacity to competently plan and to sustain actions for a duration sufficient to restore ecological resilience. If a restoration is degraded enough to require human intervention to recover, the outcome of a project is as likely to reflect its organizational reality as much as its ecological circumstances.
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