{"id":151791,"date":"2019-07-10T07:31:22","date_gmt":"2019-07-10T11:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=151791"},"modified":"2023-06-27T12:16:29","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T16:16:29","slug":"opportunities-exist-restore-tropical-rainforests-heres-mapped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2019\/07\/opportunities-exist-restore-tropical-rainforests-heres-mapped\/","title":{"rendered":"Opportunities Exist to Restore Tropical Rainforests \u2013 Here\u2019s How We Mapped Them"},"content":{"rendered":"

The green belt of tropical rainforests that covers equatorial regions of the Americas, Africa, Indonesia and Southeast Asia is turning brown. Since 1990,\u00a0Indonesia has lost 50% of its original forest, the Amazon 30% and Central Africa 14%<\/a>. Fires, logging, hunting, road building and fragmentation have heavily damaged\u00a0more than 30% of those that remain<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These forests\u00a0provide many benefits<\/a>: They store large amounts of carbon, are home to numerous wild species, provide food and fuel for local people, purify water supplies and improve air quality. Replenishing them is an urgent global imperative. A newly published study in the journal Science by European authors finds that there is room for\u00a0an extra 3.4 million square miles (0.9 billion hectares) of canopy cover<\/a>\u00a0around the world, and that replenishing tree cover at this full potential would contribute significantly to reducing the risk of harmful climate change<\/p>\n

But there aren\u2019t enough resources to restore all tropical forests that have been lost or damaged. And restoration can conflict with other activities, such as farming and forestry. As a\u00a0tropical forest ecologist<\/a>, I am interested in developing better tools for assessing where these efforts will be most cost-effective and beneficial.<\/p>\n

Over the past four years, tropical forestry professor\u00a0Pedro Brancalion<\/a>and I have led a team of researchers from\u00a0an international network<\/a>\u00a0in evaluating the benefits and feasibility of restoration across tropical rainforests around the world. Our newly published findings\u00a0identify restoration hotspots<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 areas where restoring tropical forests would be most beneficial and least costly and risky. They cover over 385,000 square miles (100 million hectares), an area as large as Spain and Sweden combined.<\/p>\n

The five countries with the largest areas of restoration hotpots are Brazil, Indonesia, India, Madagascar and Colombia. Six countries in Africa \u2013 Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Togo, South Sudan and Madagascar \u2013 hold rainforest areas where restoration is expected to yield the highest benefits with the highest feasibility. We hope our results can help governments, conservation groups and international funders target areas where there is high potential for success.<\/p>\n

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A native tree nursery for large-scale restoration of Atlantic Forest at Reserva Natural Guapia\u00e7u, Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil.<\/span>\u00a0Robin Chazdon<\/span>,\u00a0CC BY-ND<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Where to start<\/strong><\/p>\n

Intact forest landscapes<\/a>\u00a0in tropical regions declined by 7.2% from 2000 to 2013, mainly due to logging, clearing and fires. These losses have\u00a0dire consequences<\/a>\u00a0for global biodiversity, climate change and forest-dependent peoples.<\/p>\n

As my work has shown,\u00a0tropical forests can recover<\/a>\u00a0after they have been cleared or damaged. Although these second-growth forests will never perfectly replace the older forests that have been lost, planting carefully selected trees and assisting natural recovery processes can restore many of their former properties and functions.<\/p>\n

But restoration is not uniformly feasible or desirable, and the benefits that forests provide are not evenly distributed. To make informed choices about restoration efforts and investments, organizations need more detailed spatial information. Existing\u00a0global maps of restoration opportunities<\/a>\u00a0are based on actual versus potential levels of tree canopy cover. We wanted to go beyond this measurement to identify where the greatest potential payoffs and challenges lay.<\/p>\n

Our study used high-resolution satellite imagery and the latest peer-reviewed research to integrate information about four benefits from forest restoration: biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation and water security. We also assessed three aspects of feasibility: cost, investment risk and the likelihood of restored forests surviving into the future.<\/p>\n

We studied these variables across all lowland tropical moist forests worldwide, dividing them into 1-kilometer square blocks that had lost more than 10% of their tree canopy cover in 2016. Each of the seven factors we studied had equal weight in our calculation of total restoration opportunity scores.<\/p>\n

The top-scoring blocks, which we call \u201crestoration hotspots,\u201d represent the most compelling regions for tropical forest restoration, with maximum overall benefits and minimal negative trade-offs.<\/p>\n

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