Skip to main content

REVIEW article

Front. For. Glob. Change
Sec. Forest Management
Volume 7 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/ffgc.2024.1420127

How to measure outcomes in forest restoration? A European review of success and failure indicators

Provisionally accepted
MARÍA MENÉNDEZ-MIGUÉLEZ MARÍA MENÉNDEZ-MIGUÉLEZ 1*ÁLVARO RUBIO-CUADRADO ÁLVARO RUBIO-CUADRADO 2ISABEL CAÑELLAS ISABEL CAÑELLAS 1MAITANE ERDOZAIN MAITANE ERDOZAIN 3SERGIO DE MIGUEL SERGIO DE MIGUEL 3,4Katharina Lapin Katharina Lapin 5JOHANNA HOFFMANN JOHANNA HOFFMANN 5LELAND WERDEN LELAND WERDEN 6ICÍAR ALBERDI ICÍAR ALBERDI 1
  • 1 Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Madrid, Spain
  • 2 Polytechnic University of Madrid, Madrid, Madrid, Spain
  • 3 Forest Technology Center of Catalonia (CTFC), Solsona, Catalonia, Spain
  • 4 Universitat de Lleida, Lleida, Catalonia, Spain
  • 5 Austrian Research Centre for Forests (BFW), Vienna, Vienna, Austria
  • 6 ETH Zürich, Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland

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

    Restoration involves the recovery and repair of environments because environmental damage is not always irreversible, and communities are not infinitely resilient to such harm. When restoration projects are applied to nature, either directly or indirectly these may take the form of ecological, forestry or hydrological restoration, for example. In the current scenario of global climate change and increasing intensity of disturbances the importance of restoration in all types of ecosystems in order to adapt to the new conditions (so called prestoration) is evident. Whatever the objective of the restoration initiative, there is a lack of consensus as regards common indicators to evaluate the success or failure of the different initiatives implemented. In this study, we have carried out an extensive meta-analysis review of scientific papers aiming to evaluate the outcomes of restoration projects. We have done a review and selected 95 studies implemented in Europe. We explored the main pre-restoration land cover in which restoration initiatives have been implemented, the main causes of degradation, the objective of the restoration action and the indicators selected to analyze the success or failure of the action. We identified a total of 84 indicators in the analyzed papers and compared with the ones proposed for forest in the recent Nature Restoration Law. The analysis revealed five indicators commonly used for the evaluation of restoration initiatives (abundance, coverage, density, Ellenberg indicator, and richness), even where the initial objective has not yet been achieved. Our findings underscore both the benefits and challenges associated with a specific set of harmonized indicators for evaluating the success or failure of restoration initiatives.

    Keywords: Forest monitoring, disturbances, abundance, richness, restoration reporting, practical knowledge

    Received: 19 Apr 2024; Accepted: 24 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 MENÉNDEZ-MIGUÉLEZ, RUBIO-CUADRADO, CAÑELLAS, ERDOZAIN, DE MIGUEL, Lapin, HOFFMANN, WERDEN and ALBERDI. 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: MARÍA MENÉNDEZ-MIGUÉLEZ, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, 28006, Madrid, Spain

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.