Restoration practitioners and researchers have been grappling with these questions in the backdrop of the numerous ecological restoration projects emerging in the tropics.
At present, billions of dollars are being poured into restoration projects globally. Unfortunately, funds to monitor restoration outcomes are not always included in these projects and rarely funded for more than two years. In the absence of clear answers to the above-mentioned questions, it is difficult to plan and budget for monitoring efforts, and as a result monitoring of restoration outcomes can frequently be underfunded.
To prioritize more efficient use of limited resources, it is essential to have standardized guidelines that establish how much monitoring is useful to gauge project success.
Our Approach:
We are an interdisciplinary working group, composed of both researchers (biologists, social scientists, economists) and restoration practitioners.
We are leveraging existing restoration networks to locate projects that have collected data on restoration outcomes and conduct an extensive literature review. With these resources, we will construct a database and apply a standardized format for the collation of data on both ecological and socio-economic outcomes of restoration.
We will then analyze these data to determine whether long-term outcomes of restoration projects can be predicted from shorter-term data and discern if/how this differs by the metric under consideration and/or biophysical conditions. We also aim to track the monitoring costs relative to other project expenditures to evaluate the resources necessary to sufficiently monitor restoration outcomes. While the broader goals of the working group are available here, in this website, you will find detailed information about our central research questions:
- Can short-term monitoring help predict long-term tropical restoration outcomes?
- Does the predictability of long-term tropical restoration outcomes depend on the indicator being measured and/or biophysical conditions?
- What are the levels to which different indicators recover after different time periods post-restoration intervention?
You can check out our detailed data sharing policy, co-authorship policy, and code of conduct.
Expected outcomes of this project:
- A standardized global database on multifaceted outcomes of tropical restoration projects (carbon, biodiversity, socio-economic, etc.).
- Guidelines, backed by statistical analysis of the database, on how long should different indicators be monitored for?
- A freely available online tool for restoration practitioners, in which they can obtain monitoring protocols based on their selected goals.
Broader implications:
Our analysis, and the resulting tools and guidelines, will help restoration practitioners to plan their monitoring efforts and plan the budgets for the execution of these efforts. This is of great importance in the context of the ongoing UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030), and the numerous upcoming ecological restoration efforts in the tropics. Without understanding how long different indicators should be monitored for, practitioners cannot plan for their monitoring efforts, and we aim to bridge this gap.
Funding Source:
Our work is funded by the Science for Nature and People Partnership (SNAPP), a partnership of The Nature Conservancy and the Wildlife Conservation Society.
