Principles and practice of forest landscape restoration: case studies from the drylands of Latin America (2024)

Forest Landscape Restoration in the Drylands of Latin America

2012

ABSTRACT. Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) involves the ecological restoration of degraded forest landscapes, with the aim of benefiting both biodiversity and human well-being. We first identify four fundamental principles of FLR, based on previous definitions. We then critically evaluate the application of these principles in practice, based on the experience gained during an international, collaborative research project conducted in six dry forest landscapes of Latin America.

15 Restoration of Forest Ecosystems in Fragmented Landscapes of Temperate and Montane Tropical Latin America

Restoration of Forest Ecosystems in Fragmented Landscapes of Temperate and Montane Tropical Latin America

Restoration of dry tropical forests in Central America: A review of pattern and process

Fuel and Energy Abstracts, 2011

Forest Landscape Restoration Implementation: Lessons learned from selected landscapes in Africa, Asia and Latin America

IUFRO Occasional Paper No. 33, 2020

The need for large-scale forest landscape restoration has been increasingly recognized, with significant political support globally and locally. Greater investments have been initiated for restoring landscapes through forest protection, tree planting, and other measures as well as livelihood improvements. These efforts seek to achieve the restoration goals expressed by global initiatives such as the Bonn Challenge and the New York Declaration on Forests. Considerable effort has been devoted globally to promote forest landscape restoration (FLR) and its potential to provide desired benefits to nature, climate and society; however, thus far, there is limited evidence that progress has been made on the ground in restoring specific local landscapes. In order to fill this gap, IUFRO with support from the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety undertook an analysis of FLR implementation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. An IUFRO team set out to enhance understanding of the ecological, social and economic dimensions of forest landscape restoration, as well as the underlying challenges involved, thus to better judge the progress made in achieving the Bonn Challenge goals. A total of 17 landscapes in nine countries with Bonn Challenge commitments (three each in Africa, Asia and Latin America) were analysed as “snapshots” of FLR implementation. Following a common methodology developed by the IUFRO Team, local forest scientists selected landscapes with past and ongoing restoration activities. Local teams collected data and interviewed people on-site, according to an agreed questionnaire and reporting format. Questions sought to determine, notably, who is involved, what actions are taken, what is working, what is not working, what has been achieved, what policies are supporting or hindering implementation, what has been learned to date, and what could be done differently. Building on this information, over 60 specific lessons learned were derived from the landscape studies. These were further distilled into the ten overarching lessons that are presented in this publication. Our results are intended to specifically inform FLR stakeholders operating in three different spaces; i.e., field implementation, FLR facilitation, and governance and policy. Through this publication IUFRO hopes that the overarching lessons can provide valuable experiences for others involved in implementing forest landscape restoration. The publication concludes with a view on the outlook and implications for global FLR-related processes such as the Bonn Challenge. An attempt is made to link the lessons learned from the analysis of the landscapes and the various FLR initiatives presented here to the global goals and targets, and to suggest possible way forward for such global processes. Overall, the Bonn Challenge and associated efforts have been successful in mobilizing political will to begin to address the global problems of deforestation and land degradation. But the work to recover from past destructive exploitation and resource overuse has just begun.

Restoring Mexican Tropical Dry Forests: A National Review

Sustainability, 2022

Deforestation is the dominant threat to tropical dry forests (TDFs) in Mexico. Its causes include agriculture, tourism, and mining. In some cases, unassisted forest regeneration is sufficient to return diverse forest cover to a site, but in other cases, changes in land use are so severe that active restoration is required to reintroduce tree cover. The ecological and social constraints on TDF restoration in Mexico are poorly understood. To address this knowledge gap, we synthesized relevant restoration literature for Mexico published between January 1990 and February 2020. We examined 43 unique articles about TDF restoration practices in Mexico to identify (1) the national distribution of TDF restoration projects, (2) restoration objectives, and (3) factors contributing to TDF restoration success or failure. The largest number of restoration sites were in the Yucatan Peninsula, and the most common objective was to restore dry forest vegetation on lands that had been used for agricul...

Deforestation and restoration of a tropical dry forest in the Chorotega region, Costa Rica

Tropical Dry Forest Landscape Restoration in Central Veracruz, Mexico

Ecological Restoration, 2010

Large-scale ecological restoration of high-diversity tropical forests in SE Brazil

Forest Ecology and Management, 2011

Achieving Quality Forest and Landscape Restoration in the Tropics

Forests, 2020

Forest and landscape restoration (FLR) is being carried out across the world to meet ambitious global goals. However, the scale of these efforts combined with the timeframe in which they are supposed to take place may compromise the quality of restoration, and thus limit the persistence of restoration on the landscape. This paper presents a synthesis of ten case studies identified as FLR to critically analyse implemented initiatives, their outcomes, and main challenges, with an eye to improving future efforts. The identified FLR projects are diverse in terms of their spatial coverage, objectives; types of interventions; and initial socioeconomic, institutional, and environmental conditions. The six principles of FLR-which have been widely adopted in theory by large global organisations-are inadequately addressed across the initiatives presented here. The identified FLR project or interventions, although expected to offer diverse benefits, face many challenges including the lack of long-term sustainability of project interventions, limited uptake by regional and national agencies, limited monitoring, reporting and learning, poor governance structures, and technical barriers, which are mainly owing to institutional weaknesses. On the basis of these cases, we propose that the best pathway to achieving FLR is via an incremental process in which a smaller number of more achievable objectives are set and implemented over time, rather than setting highly ambitious targets that implementers struggle to achieve.