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PERSPECTIVE article

Front. Ecol. Evol.
Sec. Conservation and Restoration Ecology
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fevo.2024.1176747
This article is part of the Research Topic To plant, rewild, or ignore? Linking forest restoration methods to long-term ecological trajectories and ecosystem services. View all 7 articles

A perspective on restoring with foundation plants across anthropogenic dry forests of the Southern Cone and the Sahel

Provisionally accepted
Meredith Root-Bernstein Meredith Root-Bernstein 1*Shalom D. Addo-Danso Shalom D. Addo-Danso 2Brandon Bestelmeyer Brandon Bestelmeyer 3
  • 1 CNRS UMR 7204, Paris, France
  • 2 Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Accra, Ghana
  • 3 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Washington, District of Columbia, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Rewilding is a flexible conservation approach that may be applicable to a wide variety of ecological, historical and socio-cultural contexts. We believe that comparative socioecological research on woodland habitat trajectories among contexts is an excellent opportunity to consider possible rewilding approaches. Here, we draw on a comparison between arid and seasonally dry woodlands of the Sahel region of Africa and the Southern Cone of South America. The two regions, while sharing a common Gondwanan floral origin, differ in terms of subsequent biogeographical processes and have different climatic gradients. Historically, both regions were colonised, although along different models, and the Southern Cone has experienced greater land-use change and agricultural modernisation. Culturally, both regions have indigenous populations with traditional management techniques and local ecological knowledge, although attention to these topics in research and conservation has had different emphases in each region. Rewilding, focusing on charismatic animals, has been proposed and implemented in some parts of the Southern Cone, but has hardly been mentioned for the Sahel. We discuss the applicability of potential rewilding models involving key plants for each region, and what a plant-focused rewilding practice could gain from a comparative approach in the two regions.

    Keywords: Southern cone, Sahel, rewilding, Megaflora, savanna, Woodland

    Received: 28 Feb 2023; Accepted: 24 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Root-Bernstein, Addo-Danso and Bestelmeyer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Meredith Root-Bernstein, CNRS UMR 7204, Paris, France

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