Developing a system to prioritize forest restoration

Triaging forest restoration by weighing trade-offs in urgency and feasibility.

The restoration of degraded lands can lessen the threats posed to biodiversity by habitat loss and fragmentation; yet, it is seldom clear which areas should assume priority. This often leads to subjective decisions that result in costly failures to restore ecosystem integrity.

Published in: A landscape triage approach: Combining spatial and temporal dynamics to prioritize restoration and conservation. Journal of Applied Ecology, 52(3), 590–601.

Rappaport, D. I., Tambosi, L. R., & Metzger, J. P. (2015).

This work presents a flexible framework for prioritizing forest restoration based on the concept of triage, a process originally developed to prioritize the provision of emergency health care.

We develop a multi-scale decision-support tool to prioritize landscape restoration based on maximizing the biodiversity benefits while reducing the associated costs and risks. Efforts to enhance biodiversity through restoration and conservation may be hampered when decisions are based exclusively on contemporary landscape structure, and not made through a historical perspective. Many organisms have time-lagged responses to habitat loss, which represent critical opportunities to avert species loss and the ‘payment’ of outstanding extinction debts through swift, strategic restoration actions. Here, landscapes are prioritized based on the likelihood of extinction debts and potential to counteract species loss (i.e. urgency) and probability for recovery (i.e. feasibility). Urgency is based on evaluating how habitat availability has eroded over time. Feasibility is assessed by interpreting landscape structure to identify landscapes that are, to remain consistent with the healthcare metaphor, ‘sick enough’ to require treatment, but ‘well enough’ so that treatment will likely result in recovery. This triage process, which takes place on the landscape scale, is complemented by a regional-scale analysis in which each landscape is evaluated for its respective role in facilitating regional connectivity through serving as ecological corridors or bottlenecks. In making such trade-offs explicit, this framework aids practitioners in defining the most appropriate set of restoration or conservation strategies given the ecological constraints, biodiversity goals, and available budget. In applying the framework to a large Brazilian Atlantic forest study site that underwent substantial forest cover changes between 1990 and 2002, our results demonstrate the utility of this framework for aiding decision-makers in navigating between different trade-offs inherent to biodiversity conservation.