Evaluation and Analysis of Degraded Forest Ecosystem Restoration
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Forest degradation has become a worldwide problem.Forest resources can provide many needed resources and raw materials,continuous air purification,as well as soil and water conservation.However,a large area of tree felling has led to the substantial decrease of forest area,resulting in land desertification and a series of environmental problems.The forest degradation has become a serious problem human must solve.Hence,the evaluation of degraded forest ecosystem restoration becomes the reliable reference data.This paper evaluates and analyses China's forest ecosystem restoration,and puts forward related suggestions for the forest resources protection in the hope of providing a cetain reference to solve the problem.Keywords:
Desertification
Felling
Ecoforestry
Restoration Ecology
Environmental degradation
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Large investments are being made in the establishment of tree plantations on degraded land in Asia. These initiatives are often politically driven and aspire to achieve both economic and environmental benefits. However, the lack of clarity about the precise objectives of these schemes means that they often fail to yield either local economic or global environmental benefits. There is often a failure to negotiate with all concerned stakeholders and to recognize and resolve trade-offs. Subsidies have often had perverse impacts, and market forces may be better drivers of economic objectives of restoration programmes. Security of tenure and use rights is an important but often neglected requirement for achieving sustainability. Remnant patches of natural vegetation, even when degraded, are often valuable sources of local biodiversity in restoration schemes. The spatial patterns of different types of forest and of non-forest land are important determinants of environmental values. Biodiversity conservation requires maintaining or re-establishing habitat strips to connect natural forest blocks and protect ecological gradients. However, even monoculture plantations often have significant biodiversity value. The fundamental principles of ecosystem approaches as adopted by the Convention for the Conservation of Biological Diversity and principles for successful common property resource management provide valuable frameworks for forest restoration schemes.
Natural Capital
Restoration Ecology
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Forests are a critical component of the planet's ecosystem. Unfortunately, there has been significant degradation in forest cover over recent decades as a result of logging, conversion to crop, plantation, and pasture land, or disasters (natural or man made) such as forest fires, floods, and hurricanes. As a result, significant attention is being given to the sustainable use of forests. A key to effective forest management is quantifiable knowledge about changes in forest cover. This requires identification and characterization of changes and the discovery of the relationship between these changes and natural and anthropogenic variables. In this article, we present our preliminary efforts and achievements in addressing some of these tasks along with the challenges and opportunities that need to be addressed in the future. At a higher level, our goal is to provide an overview of the exciting opportunities and challenges in developing and applying data mining approaches to provide critical information for forest and land use management.
Land Cover
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Abstract Purpose of Review Lowering the impact of forest utilisation on the forest environment is a part of the improvement in sustainable forest management. As part of forest utilisation, timber harvesting can also cause environmental implications. The main impact of forest operations is on the soil, on regeneration and on the residual stand. The aim of the present review was to identify the state of the art in forest utilisation, identifying how and how much forest operations affect forest soil, regeneration and the remaining stand. Particular attention was paid to the level of impact and potential to limit this. Recent Findings There are a large number of publications tackling forest harvesting, but most of them do not give a comprehensive framework and they mainly focus on one or very few aspects of forest damage. In order to improve general knowledge of the impact of forest operations, it was proposed that the scope of recent findings should be examined and a compilation of the available results from different regions should be presented in one paper. Summary It was found that the least impactful machine-based forest operations were harvester–forwarder technologies, while a larger scale of damage could be expected from ground-based extraction systems (skidders) and cable yarders. Animal power, if applicable, tended to be very neutral to the forest environment. A decrease in damage is possible by optimising skid trail and strip road planning, careful completion of forest operations and training for operators. The existence of legal documents controlling post-harvesting stand damage are rare and have been implemented in only two countries; there is no post-harvesting control on soil damage and natural regeneration.
Sustainable Forest Management
Forest regeneration
Scope (computer science)
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Forest restoration has the potential to mitigate the impact of deforestation and forest degradation. Various global policies have been sought to put restoration into the mainstream agenda including under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the program for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+). The Aichi Target of the CBD set a target for at least 15% of degraded ecosystems to be restored by 2020 for key goals including biodiversity conservation, carbon enhancement and the provision of livelihoods. A theoretical framework to underpin decision-making for landscape-scale restoration has been slow to emerge, resulting in a limited contribution from science towards achieving such policy targets. My thesis develops decision frameworks to guide the restoration of degraded tropical forests to enhance biodiversity and the delivery of ecosystem services. In this thesis, three critical questions on how to make better decisions for landscape-scale restoration are addressed by: (a) considering landscape heterogeneity in terms of degradation condition, restoration action and cost, and temporally-explicit restoration benefits; (b) leveraging restoration within competing land uses using emerging policy for offsetting; and (c) enhancing feasibility by accounting for the social and political dimensions related to restoration. I use Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) as a case study area, as it represents a region that is globally important in terms of biodiversity and carbon storage. Kalimantan’s forests also provide essential livelihoods for local people. Yet, rapid deforestation and forest degradation threaten the forests in this region. Chapter 2 verifies that forest loss and degradation is the most significant threat to biodiversity in Kalimantan, impacting more than 80% of threatened animal species and 60% of threatened plant species. The future of Kalimantan’s wildlife depends on the survival of species in human-modified landscapes including in restored forest. Quantifying carbon benefit in a policy, such as forest restoration under the REDD+, requires a standardised tool, which has not been available for data-poor regions including Kalimantan. In Chapter 3, I examine a process-based model, called 3-PG (physiological principles for predicting growth), to estimate the above-ground biomass (AGB) content of the major forest types occurring on the island of Borneo. Using readily available climate and soil data, the results indicate the 3-PG model accurately predicts AGB compared with field-measured data, revealing the potential application of this model for carbon sequestration analyses. The datasets along with a set of parameters used in this chapter are employed in the subsequent chapters. Degraded tropical forests are characterised by a broad spectrum of forest condition states, mainly as a result of varying intensities of logging and fire. In Chapter 4, I develop a new framework to optimally allocate restoration investments to forests of varying condition, with two contrasting objectives: carbon and biodiversity. The work takes into account a diverse suite of restoration techniques and their costs and quantifies time-dependent restoration benefits in terms of carbon sequestration and the improvement of habitat for threatened mammals. I find that the distribution of investments is highly dependent on the restoration objective, which inevitably involves trade-offs between objectives. Nonetheless, for greatest achievement of both objectives, I demonstrate that restoring highly degraded Bornean lowland forest should receive the greatest investment. Environmental offsetting is an emerging opportunity to leverage restoration over economic activities. Employing a backcasting approach, Chapter 5 presents the first investigation of the potential application of restoration as a policy tool to offset carbon and biodiversity loss from agricultural development at a landscape scale. Using an oil-palm case study in Kalimantan, I find offsetting biodiversity loss from past oil-palm plantation developments requires 8.7% of Kalimantan’s landmass to be restored at a cost of US$7.6 billion. In contrast, compensating carbon emissions would require an area of less than 2% of the region at a cost of US$1.8 billion by restoring degraded peatlands, including the failed Ex-Mega Rice Project in Central Kalimantan. My findings raise questions on the overall capacity of the oil-palm industry, and the agriculture sector more broadly, to fully offset biodiversity loss. Forest restoration has had variable success, with performance strongly moderated by specific socio-ecological and political contexts within a region. To enhance social feasibility and political permissibility in restoration, Chapter 6 demonstrates the first integration of a socio-ecological systems framework with systematic decision-making to develop a context-specific restoration plan for livelihoods provision. I compare areas that were prioritised for restoration identified solely on the basis of biophysical criteria with those that combine socio-political and biophysical criteria. It emerges that incorporating the socio-political context alters the identification of priority areas for restoration, with only half the priority areas remaining the same with, and without, the socio-political factors. While the social feasibility and political permissibility can be enhanced, accounting for these constraints is likely to incur substantial opportunity costs. My framework reveals significant deficiencies and inefficiencies associated with existing restoration policies for Kalimantan. My thesis demonstrates that the best decisions for landscape-scale restoration are not simply made as the result of a binary answer: restore or not restore. Using carefully developed frameworks, I have shown how and where restoration should be carried out, with cost-effective implementation and with opportunities for landscape-scale projects. By putting the theoretical analyses undertaken in my thesis into the context of a globally important case study, my research provides evidence for science-based restoration policy that is transparent and transferable to achieve ambitious global policy targets.
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Restoration Ecology
Environmental degradation
Land restoration
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Deforestation
Restoration Ecology
Environmental degradation
Land restoration
Shifting cultivation
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The necessity and possibility of applying ecological principles to management of the forests are discussed. Sustainable forest management practices must be based on an understanding of how natural forest ecosystems work. Maintenance of soil quality and nutrient stocks may necessitate adjusting timber harvest rates and leaving more large woody debris on cutover sites; Protection of water quality and yield and prevention of flooding and landslides call for greater attention to the negative impacts of logging roads and the value of undisturbed buffer zones along streams and rivers; Conservation of forest biodiversity will often require reducing forest fragmentation caused by clear cuts and constructing roads. What's more, planning at the landscape level is needed to address ecological concerns such as biodiversity, water flows, and forest fragmentation, and land managers should be alert for climaterelated stresses. In general, sustainable management policies must make full use of current ecological knowledge and the goal of our policy efforts today should be to design forest management practices that assure the value of our forest resources for future generations.
Ecoforestry
Sustainable Forest Management
Coarse Woody Debris
Sustainable Management
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Limiting
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Forest degradation is broadly defined as a reduction in the capacity of a forest to produce ecosystem services such as carbon storage and wood products as a result of anthropogenic and environmental changes.The main causes of degradation include unsustainable logging, agriculture, invasive species, fire, fuelwood gathering, and livestock grazing.Forest degradation is widespread and has become an important consideration in global policy processes that deal with biodiversity, climate change, and forest management.There is, however, no generally recognized way to identify a degraded forest because perceptions of forest degradation vary depending on the cause, the particular goods or services of interest, and the temporal and spatial scales considered.Here, we suggest that there are types of forest degradation that produce a continuum of decline in provision of ecosystem services, from those in primary forests through various forms of managed forests to deforestation.Forest degradation must be measured against a desired baseline condition, and the types of degradation can be represented using five criteria that relate to the drivers of degradation, loss of ecosystem services and sustainable management, including: productivity, biodiversity, unusual disturbances, protective functions, and carbon storage.These criteria are not meant to be equivalent and some might be considered more important than others, depending on the local forest management objectives.We propose a minimum subset of seven indicators for the five criteria that should be assessed to determine forest degradation under a sustainable ecosystem management regime.The indicators can be remotely sensed (although improving calibration requires ground work) and aggregated from stand to management unit or landscape levels and ultimately to sub-national and national scales.
Forest degradation
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Ecoforestry
Environmental degradation
Restoration Ecology
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Umbrella species
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