Measuring and monitoring restored ecosystems: can remote sensing be applied to the ecological recovery wheel to inform restoration success?

Abstract

The commencement of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration has highlighted the urgent need to improve restoration science and fast‐track ecological outcomes. The application of remote sensing for monitoring purposes has increased over the past two decades providing a variety of image datasets and derived products suitable to map and measure ecosystem properties (e.g. vegetation species, community composition, and structural dimensions such as height and cover). However, the operational use of remote sensing data and derived products for ecosystem restoration monitoring in research, industry, and government has been relatively limited and underutilized. In this paper, we use the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) ecological recovery wheel (ERW) to assess the current capacity of drone‐airborne‐satellite remote sensing datasets to measure each of the SER's recommended attributes and sub‐attributes for terrestrial restoration projects. Based on our combined expertise in the areas of ecological monitoring and remote sensing, a total of 11 out of 18 sub‐attributes received the highest feasibility score and show strong potential for remote sensing assessments; while sub‐attributes such as gene flows, all trophic levels and chemical and physical substrates have a reduced capacity for monitoring. We argue that in the coming decade, ecologists can combine remote sensing with the ERW to monitor restoration recovery and reference ecosystems for improved restoration outcomes at the local, regional, and landscape scales. The ERW approach can be adapted as a monitoring framework for projects to utilize the benefits of remote sensing and inform management through scalable, operational, and meaningful outcomes.