Resource Database

CarbonWATCH–Assessing your carbon inventory at the landscape level using geospatial technology

As climate change becomes an increasing threat, and organizations across the globe are setting ambitious net-zero and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals, assessing, inventorying, and monitoring carbon stock in plants and soils has become vitally important to a variety of businesses and sectors. Stantec’s CarbonWATCH tool measures the amount of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) present in vegetation and soil and can be deployed in any ecosystem for a wide variety of industries and professionals. Using a combination of high-resolution imagery, LiDAR, vegetation species allometric models, and artificial intelligence/machine learning, we can quantify CO2e in reclamation sites and\or mature natural capital locations faster and more accurately than traditional methods. During this webinar, participants will learn about the carbon markets, needs, the Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) process versus traditional monitoring methods, and how CarbonWATCH is utilized to streamline carbon measurements in vegetation and soil.

The launch of the video series “Native Seed: Supplying Restoration”

Native seeds are a crucial component in terrestrial restoration, and their reliable supply is necessary to ensure that the restoration of degraded ecosystems can be performed at scale. The Bureau of Land Management, in collaboration with the Society of Ecological Restoration’s International Network for Seed-based Restoration, The Nature Conservancy, and Holden Films, produced a series of educational documentaries that explore each step of the native seed supply chain in one of the largest and most sophisticated native seed markets in the world, the Western United States. Episodes of the nine-part series have been released weekly throughout the summer and can be viewed on ser-insr.org/native-seed-film.

In this webinar, representatives from BLM, SER-INSR, TNC, and Holden Films discuss the production of the video series from both a scientific and cinematographic perspective and share stories of this incredible journey. The panel discussion is followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

Coral-Focused Climate Change Adaptation and Restoration Based on Accelerating Natural Processes: Launching the “Reefs of Hope” Paradigm

The demise of coral reefs due to climate change is now a certainty, and investing in restoration without facing this reality risks failure. A new coral-focused paradigm is proposed, based on helping coral reefs adapt to rising temperature, ensuring that as many coral species as possible survive locally over time. Genebank nurseries of bleaching resistant corals are secured in cooler waters, to prevent their demise as heat stress increases. From nurseries corals are harvested to create nucleation patches of genetically diverse pre-adapted corals, which become reproductively, ecologically and biologically viable at reef scale, spreading over time. This “Reefs of Hope” paradigm, modelled on tropical forest restoration, creates dense coral patches, forming fish habitat immediately. The fish increase coral and substratum health, which in turn enhances natural larval-based recovery processes. Incoming coral recruits, attracted to the patch, are expected to be inoculated by heat adapted algal symbionts, becoming resitant to bleaching.

Relevance for the Short Term Action Plan for Ecosystem Restoration:
Highly relevant new restoration paradigm for coral reefs

SER-Europe: State of Ecological Restoration in Iceland

Join SER-Europe, Kristín Svavarsdóttir, and Sunna Áskelsdóttir (Soil Conservation Service of Iceland) for a discussion of the state of ecological restoration in Iceland.

S14. Hydrological Restoration

W9. Soil and Water Bioengineering, a Nature based discipline between grey and green Infrastructures

W2. Flagship program in the Mediterranean Region UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

S6. Restoration Planning

W7. Addressing the climate emergency through citizen-driven forest restoration projects

S16. Society and Restoration

W8. Ecosystem health, ecological restoration, and human health: let’s identify and strengthen the linkages

W11. Mind Your Language! Restoration, Regeneration or Rewilding? What is the best way to communicate conservation strategies to the public?

W1. Enhancing capacities for effective ecosystem restoration throughout the UN Decade and beyond

W5. WWF-SER Standards for the Certification of Forest Ecosystem Restoration

Opening ceremony. Teresa Ribera, Secretary of State for the Environment, Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Government of Spain (in Spanish)

Opening ceremony. Mireia Mollà, Secretary of Agriculture, Rural Development, Climate Emergency and Ecological Transition of the Regional Government of Valencia (in Spanish)

Measuring Climate Change Mitigation Potential

UNEP-WCMC and partners have developed a how-to guide to help practitioners quantify the climate change mitigation potential of landscape restoration projects.  These tools are based on guidance and methodologies from the IPCC, and allow users to enter data about their projects to produce rapid assessments of climate mitigation potential. The tools were originally created to assess projects focused on land management, but have been increasingly adopted in conservation. However, they can be challenging to use, making a how-to guide essential to ensure they are understood and applied correctly.  This new guidance allows restoration practitioners to better understand the ethos, tools, and methods available to produce greenhouse gas balance estimates for ecosystem restoration actions. It covers the full assessment process, from selecting an appropriate tool, to collecting data, developing scenarios, and understanding results. The goal is to enable restoration projects to better demonstrate their multiple benefits by quantifying their climate mitigation potential.

Relevance for the Short Term Action Plan for Ecosystem Restoration:
This report helps to demonstrate how ecosystem restoration can contribute to national and international targets for climate change mitigation and provides methodology and case studies to help assess the carbon benefits of ecosystem restoration

SER-E Webinar: State of Ecological Restoration in Flanders

Join SER-Europe and Kris Decleer for a discussion of the state of ecological restoration in Flanders.

SER-E Webinar: State of Ecological Restoration in France

Join SER-Europe together with André Evette, Renaud Jaunatre, and Delphine Jaymond (INRAE) for a dicussion on the state of ecological restoration in France.

GlobalUsefulNativeTrees (GlobUNT)

We have developed the GlobalUsefulNativeTrees (GlobUNT; https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.11.25.517923) database to directly support the principles advocated by the ‘golden rules for reforestation’, including planting tree mixtures that maximize the benefits to local livelihoods and the diversity of native trees. Developed primarily by combining data from GlobalTreeSearch with the World Checklist of Useful Plant Species, GlobUNT includes 14,014 tree species that can be filtered for ten major use categories, across 242 countries and territories.

Relevance for the Short Term Action Plan for Ecosystem Restoration:
GlobalUsefulNativeTrees is a global and user-friendly web-based database that allows users to select assemblages of useful native tree species for any country in the world

S8. Mine Restoration

Global Tree Knowledge Platform

The Global Tree Knowledge Platform is all about the trees in ‘treed’ landscapes. Its purpose is to support the better use of tree species – to promote the right tree in the right place for the right purpose – to bring greater benefits to humans and the environment. The Platform can be used in two ways, either based on the type of resource (Tree databases | Maps and Apps | Guidelines | Analysis packages) or by subject (Domesticating tree species | Sourcing planting material for growers | Trees and climate change | Exploring the many uses of tree species). Planters, scientists, policy makers and anyone else who is interested in trees will enjoy using the resources. For each resource, we explain its use and the user group.

Relevance for the Short Term Action Plan for Ecosystem Restoration:
Various resources in the Global Tree Knowledge Platform are directly relevant for steps A, B, C or D. For example, the Agroforestry Species Switchboard provides access to 53 web-based information sources for over 170,000 plant species

A New Legal Principle on Ecological Restoration: A New Way to Scale Up Restoration?

The United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration is an opportunity for States to advance the development of substantive and qualitative international law obligations for conducting restoration activities. This will help countries move beyond the more quantitative target-driven approach that currently focuses international commitments on the percentage of degraded areas that have to be restored. In this webinar we argue for a possible new pathway for States to accelerate and pursue international obligations to undertake ecological restoration by advocating for the development of a new international legal principle on ecological restoration. This principle would add to existing principles such as the prevention principle, and aims at achieving the highest level of recovery possible. The webinar will explain what legal principles are and what their value is. The webinar will look into the new principle on ecological restoration, its meaning and core elements underpinning this principle, and give examples how this could be used in practice.

SER-E Webinar: State of Ecological Restoration in Germany

Join SER-Europe for a discussion on the state of ecological restoration in Germany. Speakers: Dr. Daniel Lauterbach, Dr. Holger Rössling, Janine Ruffer, Martin Szaramowicz, Michael Zauft. Affiliation: Stiftung NaturSchutzFonds Brandenburg

Precision Restoration: A Necessary Approach to Foster Forest Recovery in the 21st Century

Forest restoration programs are often based on the sowing or plantation of large amounts of propagules but with little care of the plants. As a result, high rates of mortality or damage to the plants (e.g. by herbivores) are common, translating into a loss of time and resources. We advocate that restoration in general, and forest restoration in particular, should consider a precision approach that maximizes its efficiency, trying to ensure that planted seedlings or sowed seeds will become adult trees with the appropriate landscape configuration to create functional and self-regulating forest ecosystems. Precision Forest Restoration should take advantage of ecological knowledge, technologies and methodologies from the landscape scale to the individual-plant scale, and from the more traditional, low-tech approaches to the latest high-tech ones to ensure the survival of the revegetated plants. Precision Forest Restoration may be more expensive at the level of individual plants, but will be more cost-effective in the long-term if it allows for the creation of resilient forests able to provide multiple ecosystem services.

SER-EC Webinar: The Nashwaak Greenway Project

Project Coordinator, Natalie Deseta presents on the Nashwaak Watershed Association’s (NWAI) community-based approach to leave room for the river and restore and conserve native floodplain forested wetlands in Fredericton, New Brunswick. The Nashwaak Greenway Project aims to increase community resilience in a changing climate – by increasing landscape connectivity, mitigating local overland flooding, providing critical habitat for native aquatic and terrestrial species, and connecting people with nature through provision of recreational green space that they are helping to restore and steward.

IERQC Webinar: Evaluating Aquatic Habitat Restoration of 21st Avenue West – A St. Louis River Beneficial Use Project

An IERQC presentation on aquatic habitat restoration of 21st Avenue West, a location along the St. Louis River.

SER-E Webinar: State of Ecological Restoration in Ireland

Join SER-Europe for a discussion on the state of ecological restoration in Ireland.

IERQC Webinar: Facilitating Beneficial Use of Dredged Materials with the Dredged Material Decision Tool (DMDT)

Topic: Facilitating Beneficial Use of Dredged Materials with the Dredged Material Decision Tool (DMDT). Speaker: Katie Williams (US Environmental Protection Agency)

Ecological Restoration: Where It Has Been and Where It Is Going

As we start the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, join us for a panel discussion featuring experts who have been involved in the field of ecological restoration for several decades and witnessed its evolution firsthand. Panelists will share their experiences in the field, visions for the future, and lessons learned through free-flowing discussion and story sharing. This webinar is co-hosted by SER and Biohabitats.