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When is a forest a forest? Forest concepts and definitions in the era of forest and landscape restoration.

ABSTRACT: We present a historical overview of forest concepts and definitions, linking these changes with distinct perspectives and management objectives. Policies dealing with a broad range of forest issues are often based on definitions created for the purpose of assessing global forest stocks, which do not distinguish between natural and planted forests or reforests, and which have not proved useful in assessing national and global rates of forest regrowth and restoration. Implementing and monitoring forest and landscape restoration requires additional approaches to defining and assessing forests that reveal the qualities and trajectories of forest patches in a spatially and temporally dynamic landscape matrix. New technologies and participatory assessment of forest states and trajectories offer the potential to operationalize such definitions. Purpose-built and contextualized definitions are needed to support policies that successfully protect, sustain, and regrow forests at national and global scales. We provide a framework to illustrate how different management objectives drive the relative importance of different aspects of forest state, dynamics, and landscape context.

SUBMITTER: Chazdon RL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4980317 | biostudies-other | 2016 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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When is a forest a forest? Forest concepts and definitions in the era of forest and landscape restoration.

Chazdon Robin L RL Brancalion Pedro H S PH Laestadius Lars L Bennett-Curry Aoife A Buckingham Kathleen K Kumar Chetan C Moll-Rocek Julian J Vieira Ima Célia Guimarães IC Wilson Sarah Jane SJ

Ambio 20160309 5

We present a historical overview of forest concepts and definitions, linking these changes with distinct perspectives and management objectives. Policies dealing with a broad range of forest issues are often based on definitions created for the purpose of assessing global forest stocks, which do not distinguish between natural and planted forests or reforests, and which have not proved useful in assessing national and global rates of forest regrowth and restoration. Implementing and monitoring f ...[more]

PMID: 26961011

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Project description:BackgroundForest landscape restoration (FLR) has been adopted by governments and practitioners across the globe to mitigate and adapt to climate change and restore ecological functions across degraded landscapes. However, the extent to which these activities capture CO2 with associated climate mitigation impacts are poorly known, especially in geographies where data on biomass growth of restored forests are limited or do not exist. To fill this gap, we developed biomass accumulation rates for a set of FLR activities (natural regeneration, planted forests and woodlots, agroforestry, and mangrove restoration) across the globe and global CO2 removal rates with corresponding confidence intervals, grouped by FLR activity and region/climate.ResultsPlanted forests and woodlots were found to have the highest CO2 removal rates, ranging from 4.5 to 40.7 t CO2 ha-1 year-1 during the first 20 years of growth. Mangrove tree restoration was the second most efficient FLR at removing CO2, with growth rates up to 23.1 t CO2 ha-1 year-1 the first 20 years post restoration. Natural regeneration removal rates were 9.1-18.8 t CO2 ha-1 year-1 during the first 20 years of forest regeneration, followed by agroforestry, the FLR category with the lowest and regionally broad removal rates (10.8-15.6 t CO2 ha-1 year-1). Biomass growth data was most abundant and widely distributed across the world for planted forests and natural regeneration, representing 45% and 32% of all the data points assessed, respectively. Agroforestry studies, were only found in Africa, Asia, and the Latin America and Caribbean regions.ConclusionThis study represents the most comprehensive review of published literature on tree growth and CO2 removals to date, which we operationalized by constructing removal rates for specific FLR activities across the globe. These rates can easily be applied by practitioners and decision-makers seeking to better understand the positive climate mitigation impacts of existing or planned FLR actions, or by countries making restoration pledges under the Bonn Challenge Commitments or fulfilling Nationally Determined Contributions to the UNFCCC, thereby helping boost FLR efforts world-wide.

Project description:Tropical forest restoration initiatives are becoming more frequent worldwide in an effort to mitigate biodiversity loss and ecosystems degradation. However, there is little consensus on whether an active or a passive restoration strategy is more successful for recovering biodiversity because few studies make adequate comparisons. Furthermore, studies on animal responses to restoration are scarce compared to those on plants, and those that assess faunal recovery often focus on a single taxon, limiting the generalization of results. We assessed the success of active (native mixed-species plantations) and passive (natural regeneration) tropical cloud forest restoration strategies based on the responses of three animal taxa: amphibians, ants, and dung beetles. We compared community attributes of these three taxa in a 23-year-old active restoration forest, a 23-year-old passive restoration forest, a cattle pasture, and a mature forest, with emphasis on forest-specialist species. We also evaluated the relationship between faunal recovery and environmental variables. For all taxa, we found that recovery of species richness and composition were similar in active and passive restoration sites. However, recovery of forest specialists was enhanced through active restoration. For both forests under restoration, similarity in species composition of all faunal groups was 60-70% with respect to the reference ecosystem due to a replacement of generalist species by forest-specialist species. The recovery of faunal communities was mainly associated with canopy and leaf litter covers. We recommend implementing active restoration using mixed plantations of native tree species and, whenever possible, selecting sites close to mature forest to accelerate the recovery of tropical cloud forest biodiversity. As active restoration is more expensive than passive restoration, both strategies might be used in a complementary manner at the landscape level to compensate for high implementation costs.

Dataset Information

When is a forest a forest? Forest concepts and definitions in the era of forest and landscape restoration.

Publications

When is a forest a forest? Forest concepts and definitions in the era of forest and landscape restoration.

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