Ecological restoration in Brazilian biomes: Identifying advances and gaps
Introduction
Despite the long history of environmental degradation in Brazil and elsewhere in the world, only recently research lines have been developed to understand the dynamics of these processes and to attempt to revert them. Restoration ecology is a sub-discipline of Ecology, which includes practical activities of restoration, based on ecological theory and on cultural and socioeconomic questions/factors (Higgs, 2005, Aronson et al., 2011). Ecological restoration is defined by the Society for Ecological Restoration, 2004 as: “[…] a deliberate activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of an ecosystem regarding its health, integrity and sustainability, which requires restoration because it has been degraded, damaged, transformed or totally destroyed as a direct or indirect result of human activities […].”
Restoration ecology, together with related activities, has grown worldwide in the last three decades. It is considered a key element for the conservation of natural resources through the intervention in degraded ecosystem and has gained attention in the management of public policies (Hobbs et al., 2011). In the nineties, there was a significant increase in the number of research papers owing to the gradual expansion of this science as an area of knowledge and research (Oliveira and Engel, 2011, Wortley et al., 2013). In addition, the consolidation of the global debate on the environment has created a demand for large-scale restoration projects (Soares-Filho et al., 2014). Globally, the Paris Agreement, the Initiative 20 × 20, and the Bonn Challenge have identified restoration targets of up to 350 million hectares by 2030 as possible avenues to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide and slow climate change. In Brazil, a national restoration goal of 12 million hectares by 2030 has been established by the National Plan for the Recovery of Native Vegetation (MMA, 2017Brazil, 2017a). With respect to research, one of the goals of this national plan is to prepare a list of priority themes by region to fund research to address knowledge gaps (see Table 13 in MMA, 2017Brazil, 2017a). A key outcome of this plan is that restoration actions should be based on the best available science and these should be put into practice according to questions of greater relevance to the real world (Hobbs and Harris, 2001) and science can help better public policies for restoration (Garcia et al., 2019).
Faced with this immense challenge of large-scale restoration in Brazil, there is an urgent demand for information that will assist decision-makers in undertaking restoration projects in the coming years. The country already has an active network of researchers and practitioners which allows information to be exchanged through different communication platforms (Isernhagen et al., 2017). From this network, one of the main demands was a systematic review of published research in order to support public policy, legislation, improved implementation practices, and scaling up programs. Here, we fill this gap and present an overview on trends in ecological restoration across Brazilian biomes, based on a literature review.
Section snippets
Tool and database
To identify trends in ecological restoration studies in Brazil, we conducted a search for publications from 1945 until July 2018. We used the advanced search of the Web of Science platform with the following keywords: “ecological restoration”; “ecological engineering”; “rehabilitation”; “reclamation”; “bioremediation”; “reforestation”; “revegetation”; “tree planting”; “passive restoration”; seedling transplanting; “direct seeding”; “direct sowing”; “transposition of soil” OR “soil
Results
Our keyword search identified 530 papers. After closer analysis, 291 were considered to be within the scope of this study (see Appendix A). A pioneering ecological restoration paper about the Amazon was published in 1988 (Uhl et al., 1988) and has 569 citations (Fig. 1). The peak in the number of publications on ecological restoration was in 2016, with 48 papers (Fig. 1). On average, each paper has received 11 citations so far. From the papers analysed, 18 had more than 50 citations and only
Discussion
Our bibliometric study of published research addressing ecological restoration in Brazil over the last 30 years revealed solid and growing scientific production over the period. Although scientific production has increased substantially, we identified a large bias in the distribution of studies in relation to the restored biome, with a predominance of studies in the Atlantic Forest, Amazonia, and Cerrado and a small number in Pampa, Pantanal, and Caatinga, indicating relevant knowledge gaps. We
Conclusion
Brazil has been considered a key country for achieving global restoration goals as it concentrates some of the largest centers of biodiversity and ecosystem services in the world. Owing to these characteristics, it has become a pioneer country in the legal regulation of restoration activities, which has resulted in a significant increase in studies over the past 15 years. Although this trend has been significant, knowledge gaps in some biomes and limitations in using some techniques show the
Acknowledgments
This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior (CAPES) - Finance code 001. LKR, FLGB, PTAO, DAMP, COM, TMRS, and PSS were financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq). We are grateful to the students of the Restoration Ecology graduation course of UFMS for their initial help on the manuscript. We are also grateful to
Declaration of Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no known competing financialinterestsor personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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