Developing landscape-scale forest restoration targets that embrace spatial pattern

Abstract

Context Forest restoration plays an important role in global efforts to slow biodiversity loss and mitigate climate change. Vegetation in remnant forests can form striking patterns that relate to ecological processes, but restoration targets tend to overlook spatial pattern. While observations of intact reference ecosystems can help to inform restoration targets, field surveys are ill-equipped to map and quantify spatial pattern at a range of scales, and new approaches are needed. Objective This review sought to explore practical options for creating landscape-scale forest restoration targets that embrace spatial pattern. Methods We assessed how hierarchy theory, satellite remote sensing, landscape pattern analysis, drone-based remote sensing and spatial point pattern analysis could be applied to assess the spatial pattern of reference landscapes and inform forest restoration targets. Results Hierarchy theory provides an intuitive framework for stratifying landscapes as nested hierarchies of sub-catchments, forest patches and stands of trees. Several publicly available tools can map patches within landscapes, and landscape pattern analysis can be applied to quantify the spatial pattern of these patches. Drones can collect point clouds and orthomosaics at the stand scale, a plethora of software can create maps of individual trees, and spatial point pattern analysis can be applied to quantify the spatial pattern of mapped trees. Conclusions This review explored several practical options for producing landscape scale forest restoration targets that embrace spatial pattern. With the decade on ecosystem restoration underway, there is a pressing need to refine and operationalise these ideas.

Ecosystem Conditions That Influence the Viability of an Old-Forest Species with Limited Vagility: The Red Tree Vole

“…These treatments could be designed to reduce the risk of habitat loss from fires if planned at a landscape scale and if treatments and habitats are strategically located [ 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 ]. Forest restoration treatments planned at landscape scales could be applied to restore ecological processes [ 76 ], and increase forest heterogeneity (e.g., intermixing different forest types and/or age classes) that could enhance forest resistance and resilience [ 77 ]. In addition to their greater resilience, heterogeneous forest landscapes, within which old-forest habitat are embedded, frequently support a wide range of ecosystem functions and services [ 78 ].…”

Characteristics and gaps in the assessment of progress in mine restoration: insights from five decades of published literature relating to native ecosystem restoration after mining

“…van der Heyde et al 2020; Loewensteiner et al 2021). Increased use of satellite or drone‐based sensors, as documented in other recent reviews of rehabilitation literature, may provide more scope for landscape scale measures of plant community structure and composition in mine restoration assessments and might demonstrate goals of similarity and blending with adjacent ecosystems at landscape scales (Bruno Rocha Martins et al 2020; McKenna et al 2020; Rudge et al 2022).…”

Remote sensing in landscape ecology

“…As expected, the core focus of recent articles in the journal that used remote sensing remains on spatial patterns and issues of heterogeneity with scaling issues often of considerable interest (Frazier 2014;Luan et al 2018;Egerer et al 2020;Rudge et al 2022;Mondal and Jeganathan 2022;Gann and Richards 2023). Many articles have made use of Landsat sensor data (Moris et al 2022;Hopkins et al 2022) notably taking advantage of the relatively long time series of data that has now been formed (Zhao et al 2015;Bost et al 2019;Jung et al 2020;Fisher et al 2021;Yu et al 2021).…”

“…There has also been growth in other sources of data. One major growth area has been the use of sensors carried on unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones which offer considerable flexibility for focused data acquisition (Egerer et al 2020;Duffy et al 2021;Borja-Martinez et al 2022;Rudge et al 2022;van Blerk et al 2022). Use has also been made of data from fine spatial resolution commercial satellites such as WorldView-2 (Gann and Richards 2023).…”