Elsevier

Forest Ecology and Management

Volume 458, 15 February 2020, 117802
Forest Ecology and Management

Ecological restoration in Brazilian biomes: Identifying advances and gaps

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2019.117802Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The Atlantic Forest is the biome with the highest number of papers on ecological restoration.

  • Pantanal, Pampa and Caatinga are the least studied in terms of ecological restoration.

  • In all biomes, most of the studies are related to monitoring.

  • The number of species used in restored areas is limited.

  • It is necessary to include different life forms, restoration techniques and studies using reference areas to measure success.

Abstract

The Bonn challenge aims at the restoration of 350 million hectares of degraded ladscapes by 2030. In Brazil, the restoration goal for 2030 is 12 million hectares. Despite the great demand for ecological restoration across the whole of Brazil, there have been no analyses of the studies carried out in different biomes. In addition, conservation efforts must cover all biomes, so that different regions can take advantage of the many benefits of restoration. Our aim was to identify advances and gaps in current restoration knowledge in order to guide future efforts in Brazil. Our bibliometric survey in the Web of Science using 23 keywords related to restoration generated a total of 530 papers, of which 291 were included in the analysis. The papers were published in 121 scientific journals between 1988 and 2018, with the largest number of papers in 2016. The Atlantic Forest was the biome with the highest number of studies, as it is one of the most threatened tropical forest regions in the world and maintains the largest number of research institutions and receives the highest level of funding support in the country. Regarding the types of studies, temporal monitoring was more frequent in the Amazon, Cerrado, Caatinga, and Pampa, while the monitoring at one point in time was more frequent in the Atlantic Forest. From the studies examined, 31% used a reference area for comparing restoration success. The most studied organisms were plants (81%), and among them, trees were the most frequent, followed by fungi, birds, invertebrates, mammals, and reptiles. The pre-restoration degradation differed among biomes, with deforestation for logging the most cited in the Amazon, agriculture, and livestock in the Atlantic Forest and Cerrado, logging and cattle ranching in Caatinga, and livestock in the Pampa and Pantanal. In general, active/assisted natural succession was the most frequent restoration process: planting seedlings more readily occurred in the Amazon, Atlantic Forest, and Caatinga, whereas natural regeneration in the Cerrado and Pantanal and sowing in Pampa. The studies varied among the age of restoration (>1 to 67 years for active restoration and >1 to 120 years for passive/unassisted natural succession), and the number of species planted (1 to 121 species). We identified an important regional knowledge gap for the Pantanal, Caatinga, and Pampa, as well as the need to include reference areas, evaluate different restoration techniques (besides planting seedlings), and the inclusion of other taxa and life forms in biodiversity studies apart from trees. We also identified the need to expand research to assess landscape metrics, prioritization, legislation, and public policies.

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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