Resource Database

Restoration for Whom, by Whom? Exploring the Socio-political Dimensions of Restoration

As the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration launches into action, urgent attention is needed to the power and politics that shape the values, meanings, and science driving restoration, to enable the creation of equitable restoration initiatives. In this webinar, we adopt a feminist political ecology lens, with a focus on gendered power relations, historical awareness, and scale integration, to examine the socio-political and economic dynamics of restoration. We demonstrate the potential of such a perspective for thinking about the social inclusivity of restoration agendas and initiatives, and demonstrate its applicability to different restoration contexts.

We bring this perspective to life through three case studies published in a special issue of Ecological Restoration that asks: “Restoration for Whom, by Whom?”. The first case, based in Kenya, shows how attention to power relations is needed to create more equitable Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes. The second, which focuses on the restoration of an urban lake in Bengaluru, India, demonstrates the importance of taking a historical perspective to understand equity considerations in restoration. The last shows the importance of conducting multi-scalar analyses to promote inclusion in and through restoration, using wetlands restoration as an example. Together, these present more grounded and nuanced ways forward for inclusive restoration initiatives.

SER-RM Webinar – Lessons from the Cal-Wood Fire: Recovery Efforts for Mitigation and Restoration

The Cal-Wood Fire ignited on October 17, 2020 and burned about 10,000 acres in Boulder County Colorado – the largest wildfire in Boulder County history. 5,000 acres burned on Boulder County Parks & Open Space land, on a heavily used recreational and conservation property called Heil Valley Ranch. The remainder of the fire footprint occurred on a combination of Forest Service land, State Land Board, and private property. Boulder County Parks & Open Space Staff is taking a lead role in fire recovery efforts, including large scale aerial mulching, hazard tree removal, erosion control measures, and native seed-based restoration. Recovery work began in early in 2021 and is currently still in progress. In this webinar, Boulder County staff will present on the fire and recovery efforts, with a panel discussion to follow presentations.

SER-E Webinar: State of Ecological Restoration in the Czech Republic

Join Karel Prach & Klára Řehounková for a discussion of the state of ecological restoration in the Czech Republic.

New Trajectories for Binational Restoration Partnerships: Restoration of the Colorado River Delta

After a century of water development under a legal framework that did not recognize nature as a legitimate water user, the Colorado River today rarely flows to the sea, and its 600,000 ha delta ecosystem has been reduced to a mere 10% of its original size. Environmental NGOs from the United States and Mexico have worked together for nearly two decades to restore riparian and wetland habitats and re-establish a modest connection between the flowing Colorado River and the Upper Gulf of California, for the benefit of nature and people. In the context of a broad dialog to improve Colorado River management at the border to create climate resilience, the two countries have adopted a series of formal, diplomatic agreements that address a suite of mutually beneficial activities that includes environmental restoration. The agreements include commitments of resources (dollars and water) towards a collaborative effort between federal, state, and local governments, NGOs, universities, and communities to initiate environmental restoration activities, while a binational science team informs policy formation and evaluates program implementation. During this webinar, we will replay a keynote presentation from SER2021 and then host a live Q&A with presenters Jennifer Pitt and Osvel Hinojosa-Huerta.

IERQC Webinar: Continuous Improvements to a Long-Term eDNA Monitoring Program

Restore Skyline Tier – A Landscape-scale Ecological Restoration Project in Tasmania

SER Webinar: Restore Skyline Tier is a landscape scale-ecological restoration project located near Scamander in northeast Tasmania (Australia) that was awarded the best large scale ecological restoration project in Australasia at the SERA Conference in Darwin earlier in 2021. Around 700ha of native forest has been regenerated using assisted natural regeneration techniques, including ecological burns after harvesting of poor quality mature Radiata Pine plantations. The project has produced numerous positive economic, social, and ecological outcomes for a relatively remote rural community. Speakers: Todd Dudley, President of North East Bioregional Network

Guidance and tool protocols for assessing the climate change mitigation benefits of landscape restoration

This document sets out the ethos, tools, and methods used to provide a greenhouse gas (GHG) balance estimate for restoration projects, using projects from the Endangered Landscapes Programme as a case study. The document provides guidance on using two GHG assessment tools, EX-ACT and the Carbon Benefits Project toolkit, to estimate the climate change mitigation benefit of landscape-scale restoration projects and the restoration activities they include.

Relevance for the Short Term Action Plan for Ecosystem Restoration:
This report helps to understand and demonstrate how ecosystem restoration can contribute to national and international targets for climate change mitigation (activity B6)

Plenary Session. Building Capacity for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Since the announcement of the UN Decade, SER has been engaging with UNEP, FAO and other
international organizations under the Global Forum on Ecological Restoration to promote the vision
and goals of the Decade. As one of the original global partners, SER has supported the development
of the strategy, participated in several Task Forces, and partnered to create the recently released
guiding principles for the Decade. SER is also working to ensure that ecological restoration is
recognized as a key tool for implementing the Decade, with an especially vital role in addressing the
dual challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. The presentation will introduce SER, its
partnership with the Decade, the new UN Decade guiding principles, the importance of ecological
restoration in the context of the Decade, and other associated activities that SER is undertaking to
support the Decade. It will tackle topics as the ecological restoration continuum, the systems to
certify professionals (CERP) and projects (SER standards), discuss the excellent results of the Make
a Difference Week 2021 and the plan to hold it annually, and finally invite attendees to SER by means
of the Membership for All program.

S1. Hot topics in ecological restoration I

Meet the Editor

Plenary session. Challenges in marine ecosystem restoration

Global change and direct anthropogenic impacts increasingly affect most marine habitats at
planetary scale. In most cases, conservation and management are largely insufficient to
maintain the health of marine habitats. Despite marine restoration is a relatively young
scientific discipline, restoration interventions are increasingly considered key actions when
changes of degraded ecosystems are beyond the potential of natural recovery. As a
consequence, despite the evaluation of restoration results is still a complex task, success
stories are becoming increasingly evident across marine habitats and geographical areas. In
my talk, I will synthesize recent knowledge in marine habitat restoration showing the main
outcomes from coordinated experiments to individuate determinants of restoration success,
under the umbrella of international projects. Then, I will describe the challenges to support
restoration upscaling, stressing the need for multidisciplinary, systemic approaches including
the full involvement of industry and human society. I will also discuss the need for setting
realistic restoration targets to empower the potential of marine ecosystems to recover their
structures and functions, including the consideration of the services they provide that should
be fully considered in the evaluations of a restoration intervention. Finally, I will discuss the
importance of developing guidelines for integrating conservation planning and prioritization
of sites for restoration within a Maritime Spatial Planning perspective to improve the
resilience of conservation/restoration plans to cumulative human impacts and climate
change.

Plenary session. Restoration of agricultural soils in Russia after the collective farming collapse: opportunities and benefits for environment

Abandonment of croplands is happening on 220 million ha worldwide and ca. 1/4 of this area
is located in Russia. The most massive cropland abandonment in Russian Federation was
caused by the collapse of the farming system in the early 1990s. The cessation of cropland
cultivation leads to the natural vegetation recovery and contributes strongly to soil restoration
by improvement of degraded properties and medium- and long-term carbon (C) sequestration
in post-agricultural ecosystems. Succession of natural vegetation and processes of soil
recovery after cropland abandonment specific for the local climate. We investigated how the
abandonment of arable soils in various bio-climatic regions of Russia affects (i) accumulation
of SOC, its composition, stability, and turnover, (ii) soil structure, (iii) microbial and enzymatic
activity during the postagricultural restoration of soils.
We concluded that the soil type as well as intrinsic pedogenic processes and time since
abandonment determine the C sequestration dynamics and the SOC properties. The pattern
of SOC sequestration and its stability during post-agricultural restoration are governed by
initial SOC stocks in former arable soils, the biochemical composition of above-/belowground
inputs, the chemical properties of soils, and the environmental conditions, mainly by aridity.
The succession of natural vegetation on the abandoned agricultural lands was accompanied
by a clear trend of increasing activity and diversity of microbial functioning and by the
specialization of enzymes for the broader chemical composition of C input into the soil as leaf
litter. Therefore, the cropland abandonment provides undeniable environmental benefits
which include improvement of soil health, increase in plant biodiversity, and climate change
mitigation owing to the intensive process of C sequestration in former agricultural lands.

Plenary session. Rethinking the role of people in efforts to protect and restore the environment

Policy and research into human-environment interactions tends to treat people as separate
from, rather than part of nature, even when applying a socio-ecological systems lens. This
conceptualisation has important implications in terms of how we do research, what we reveal
through science-policy assessments such as those undertaken for the Intergovernmental
science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, and how we monitor and
evaluate progress towards international sustainability aspirations such as the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs). It also affects how we consider issues of fairness and equity. This
presentation argues that current approaches can miss opportunities to improve human
wellbeing and equity while simultaneously reducing and reversing degradation. It draws on
recent work in Kenya involving restoration of areas affected by invasive cactus Opuntia stricta,
which explicitly focused on understanding equity and viewed humans as part of rather than
external to the system. Rethinking the role of people in efforts to protect and restore the
environment is vital in informing science and political action towards socio-ecological
restoration if outcomes are to support both environmental and socio-economic
improvement.

Plenary session. Terraforming drylands with synthetic biology

Semiarid ecosystems are threatened by global warming due to longer dehydration times and
increasing soil degradation. Mounting evidence indicates that, given the current trends,
drylands are likely to expand while crossing several aridity thresholds, including catastrophic
shifts from vegetated to desert states. Here, I present a recent suggestion based on the
concept of ecosystem terraformation, where a synthetic organism is used to counterbalance
some of the nonlinear effects causing the presence of such tipping points. Using models
incorporating facilitation and considering a simplification, we investigate how engineered
microorganisms can shape the fate of these ecosystems. We show that small modifications
enhancing cooperative loops can effectively protect drylands from experiencing critical
transitions. Additionally, we will discuss the concept of “ecological firewalls” as a communitylevel
containment phenomenon that can act as an effective limit to the spread of the synthetic
microbial strain and about future prospects for experimental implementations of this
bioengineering approach.

Plenary session. The EU Restoration Law: A New Hope

The EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030, adopted in May 2020, aims to strengthen the EU legal
framework for nature restoration, including the development of a new EU restoration law in
2021, with legally binding EU nature restoration targets. In this presentation we discuss the
various elements that we consider to be important for the new law. The issues discussed
include the following: do we really need yet another law; what is the existing legal framework
on restoration; what can or should be the relationship between existing and new legislation;
how can restoration be defined in the law; what can be the targets, the geographical scope,
the ambition level; which baseline should be used; how will states prioritize restoration
activities; what are the legal tools to achieve the restoration targets; should the law include
performance standards on restoration; how will the efforts be monitored? As the law will be
under development at the time of the conference, no definitive answers on many of these
issues can be given. But this presentation aims at clarifying the legal issues and challenges,
as well as pointing to the relevance and role for restoration scientists in the development and
implementation of the law.

Plenary session. Understanding the ecology and biogeography of global drylands

Substantial research efforts are being devoted in the last decades to understand the ecology
of major biomes and ecosystem types across large spatial scales and to use this knowledge
to improve restoration actions. However, large-scale field studies have largely carried out in
ecosystems other than drylands, which cover ~45% and host over 40% of the global
population. In this lecture I will illustrate with examples from our research how advances on
our understanding of the ecology of biogeography of drylands at the global scale can inform
restoration efforts carried out in these ecosystems, something key to halt land degradation
in these areas, mitigate climate change impacts and guarantee the supply of essential
ecosystem services to more than 2 billion people in a rapidly changing world.

Plenary session. United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

It is estimated that one-third of the world’s farmland is degraded; one third of commercial
fish stocks are over-exploited and in the last 30 years we have lost 420 million hectares of
forests – that’s an area the size of India and Nigeria combined. The United Nations Decade
on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030 aims to address these and similar issues with a global
call to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide. The strategy
prepared for the implementation of the Decade envisions a world where — for the health &
wellbeing of all life on Earth and that of future generations —the relationship between
humans and nature has been restored, where the area of healthy ecosystems is increasing
and where ecosystem loss, fragmentation and degradation has been ended. Three
interlinked pathways will help achieve this goal: the generation of a global movement; political
will; and technical capacity. This presentation provides an update on the plans for the UN
Decade and suggestions for how you can become part of #GenerationRestoration.

S2.1 Restoring European grasslands

S2.2 Restoring European grasslands

S3. Restoring Mediterranean wetlands from Science to Management

S4. Large scale analysis of biomass and Carbon accumulation in abandoned agricultural lands: possibilities for Southern Europe

S5. EU LIFE programme and socio-ecological restoration – chances, challenges and prospects

S6.1 IX International Meeting FuegoRED2020: Post-fire restoration in a changing world: vulnerability and resilience of forest ecosystems to fire

S6.2 IX International Meeting FuegoRED2020: Post-fire restoration in a changing world: vulnerability and resilience of forest ecosystems to fire

S7.1 Marine Ecosystem Restoration in changing oceans

S7.2 Marine Ecosystem Restoration in changing oceans

S8.1 Near-natural restoration of urban green infrastructure

S8.2 Near-natural restoration of urban green infrastructure

S9.1 Restoration strategies in mining areas

S9.2 Restoration strategies in mining areas