Landscape Ecology Perspective in Restoration Projects for Biodiversity Conservation: a Review

Abstract

There is good evidence that the results of a restoration program depend largely on the landscape context such as habitat cover, connectivity and isolation. Such evidence, however, is not coherently presented in the scientific literature. This review aims to provide an overview of how landscape ecology has been used in restoration projects in the last 15 years. We found only 54 empirical restoration studies published in international journals from 1997 to 2011 that used a landscape approach, mostly published between 2009 and 2011. The majority of the studies were carried out in temperate zones and forests, with habitat loss and fragmentation as the major disturbance factor (77%). Biotic manipulation was the most common management protocol (39%), followed by abiotic manipulation, land abandonment, and control of disturbance sources. Most of the studies (84%) demonstrate that the landscape context plays an important role in restoration processes. Particularly, a positive influence of the landscape context on restoration effectiveness was observed for restored areas in close proximity to neighboring patches and in landscapes with high habitat cover. However, we found that the effect of landscape characteristics on restoration outcomes may vary with species characteristics, and differ according to the population or community parameters (e.g. abundance, richness, composition) considered. In addition, different landscape aspects mediated the effects of restoration on biological communities, and thus there is not a unique set of landscape indices that can be universally used for restoration planning and monitoring. Although the literature has important gaps, since most studies are restricted to few habitat and disturbance types and consider only a limited set of landscape attributes, our findings demonstrate that landscape characteristics can be as important as local factors in influencing restoration outcomes and should be incorporated in restoration projects and programmes. By considering a wide range of landscape resilience and disturbance condition since the beginning of future restoration plans, we expect that the main gaps of knowledge identified here can be filled in the near future, helping then to reveal a more general pattern relating landscape structure to restoration outcomes.