Methodology for the identification of priority areas for post-fire restoration: study of the Sierra Bermeja forest fire 2021

Developing conservation strategies to restore populations of threatened species has been signaled as an important task by the Convention on Biological Diversity 2011–2020 targets. Species are being threatened not only by habitat loss and fragmentation but increasingly by climate change. As resources for conservation are often limited, and restoration is among the most expensive conservation strategies, developing approaches that help in the prioritization of areas for restoration efforts is a critical task. In this study, we propose a spatial multicriteria decision analysis (SMCDA) framework for identifying potential areas for plant species restoration initiatives that can explicitly take into account future climatic change. As a way to show how the framework can be applied, we took advantage of freely available niche modeling software and geospatial information to identify regional‐scale priority areas for restoration of two threatened endemic tree species (i.e. Bielschmiedia miersii and Pouteria splendens) of the “Chilean Winter Rainfall‐Valdivian Forest” Hotspot. The SMCDA framework allowed us not only to identify priority areas for species restoration but also to analyze how different environmental conditions and land‐use types may affect the selection of areas for species restoration. Our analysis suggests that the inclusion of climate change is a key factor to assess the potential areas for species restoration because species may respond differentially to future climatic conditions. This framework is conceived to be used as a complementary approach to available landscape‐scale spatial conservation planning tools.

The frequency and severity of wildfires are projected to increase in the Mediterranean region. Greece currently lacks a developed standardized system for identifying and prioritizing burnt areas in relation to their restoration needs. Prioritization of areas for post-fire restoration efforts using geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) can be useful in decision-making. However, this approach is often insufficient in effectively integrating perspectives from multiple stakeholders and socio-ecological criteria. Combining qualitative methods such as interviews with GIS and RS methods can enhance the understanding of nuances in a local context. We designed an approach to identify high-priority areas for post-fire restoration. The identification was based on interviews with stakeholders and the application of GIS and RS. We conducted 15 interviews with stakeholders working on post-fire issues and selected criteria for the prioritization analysis based on their views. The expert interviews revealed perceptions regarding the necessity of vegetation restoration and rehabilitation efforts and helped to identify the key characteristics respondents consider essential for prioritizing burnt areas for restoration. These insights established an analysis using GIS and RS to select areas based on the identified characteristics. We selected the areas for restoration based on fire history, slope, and designation as part of the protected areas. The outcomes of the analysis helped to highlight three areas that potentially need special attention. We propose a prioritization system that considers the natural regeneration potential of the Mediterranean and on-the-ground socio-ecological limitations, and can help government agencies, local foresters, private consultancies, and NGOs plan restoration actions and optimize the effectiveness of restoration programs in Greece.

This study aimed to identify priority areas for the passive restoration of the Arauai river basin, municipality of Moju, Para, using a multicriteria model. This basin is located in a region with intense land use dynamics and expansion of oil palm cultivation, and with high forest loss and fragmentation. The Weighted Linear Combination method was used, with the aggregation of five criteria (Natural Erosion Vulnerability, Potential Land Use and Cover to Passive Restoration, Proximity to the Primary Forest, Forest cover deficit in PPAs, and Distance from Roads and Highways). This analysis allowed to evaluate different biophysical classes and types of land use that affect the selection of areas for restoration. A total of 207.82 km2 of priority areas for passive restoration were identified in the studied basin, with about 80% of its priority areas having medium to very high priority. The final map generated proved to be a useful instrument in the environmental management of restoration plans in the Amazon watershed.

Habitat protection and restoration: Win–win opportunities for migratory birds in the Northern Andes

Accurate identification of priority areas for ecological restoration is an important prerequisite for ecological protection and restoration, but it is a current challenge in landscape planning. Northern Shaanxi, which is located in the middle of the Loess Plateau in China, was selected as a study area in this paper. A three-dimensional framework including natural potential, human disturbance, and landscape pattern factors was used to construct an ecological security evaluation index system, and spatial principal component analysis (SPCA) was used to quantitatively evaluate the ecological security levels of the study area. The ecological security assessment result was used as a resistance surface, and landscape elements were identified by morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA), minimum cumulative resistance (MCR) model and the gravity model. On this basis, priority areas for ecological restoration were identified by considering ecosystem security and the matching degree of landscape elements. The resulting area with low and moderately low security levels was 27,574.87 km2 in size, accounting for 34.48% of the total study area, and the ecological security situation was not ideal. We identified seventeen ecological sources with an area of 5789.36 km2, and the important ecological sources were mainly distributed in the south of the study area. We identified one hundred and thirty-six potential ecological corridors with a total length of 7431.12km, including 16 important ecological corridors with a length of 1279.43km. We also identified 83 ecological nodes, including 17 important ecological nodes. We found that the high matching degree of landscape elements included four watersheds with an area of 7571.17 km2, mainly distributed in the southern part of the study area. Fifty-one basins with a low matching degree of landscape elements were identified, covering an area of 50,399.44 km2 and mainly distributed in the west and north of the study area. We identified three levels of areas to be restored, of which the level I ecological restoration priority area was the smallest, at 7047.61 km2. The areas of the level II ecological restoration priority area and the level III ecological restoration priority area were 20,379.35 km2 and 27,866.35 km2, respectively. The two areas were large and mainly distributed in the west and north of the study area. We discussed ecological restoration strategies for different levels of ecological restoration priority areas and provided new methods for identifying priority ecological restoration areas in the future.

Identification of priority areas for territorial ecological conservation and restoration based on ecological networks: A case study of Tianjin City, China

The rapid mangrove loss and fragmentation observed in the past decades have catalyzed numerous efforts to restore mangroves globally, but nearly half of these efforts fail or underperform. Planting the wrong mangrove species on the wrong site, and overrelying on mangrove monocultures are the main mistakes. Here, we develop a methodological approach that combines a Geographic Information System-based suitability analysis and landscape connectivity analysis to identify suitable areas for species-specific and mixed-species mangrove restoration, and priority areas in terms of patch importance. We apply this approach to the Large Xiamen Bay in southeast China. Results from the case study emphasize the critical need of considering species-specific characteristics in mangrove restoration planning and the spatial heterogeneity of priority areas for mixed-species restoration. We find that mangrove restoration could indeed increase landscape connectivity of mangrove habitats. Larger patches would have more significant effects on habitat connectivity, and several small patches could be considered as stepping stones to promote landscape-level connectivity. The proposed approach has various implications for mangrove restoration efforts both at the study site and in other parts of the world.

Multicriteria Evaluation, in a GIS environment, in the definition of priority areas for forest restoration aiming at the conservation of water resources Reforestation in river basins, mainly through forest restoration, has been pointed out as one of the most feasible and cheapest solutions for the issue of good-quality water production for human consumption. Conservation actions are strategic for the reduction of the cost of water treatment. Nevertheless, even forest restoration being one of the cheapest solutions, it presents a relatively high cost, needing a plan to point out priority areas for the investment, of limited financial resources, in reforestation. Different approaches can be employed in the determination of those areas, like the use of hydrologic models, sediment yield indices etc., but the need of representation of the spatial distribution of the areas to be restored makes the use of Geographic Information Systems indispensable, due to their ability of spatial data analysis. In the last years, several methods for the determination of priority areas, running in GIS, have been developed, standing out those based on multicriteria analysis. The difference among the methods resides in the way they aggregate the criteria, mainly regarding the manner they deal with issues such as risk and trade-off. Thus, this study had the objective to analyze the Multicriteria Evaluation, in a GIS environment, through the comparison between the methods of Weighted Linear Combination and Ordered Weighted Averaging, in the generation of maps of priority areas for forest restoration, in the Corumbatai river basin, State of Sao Paulo, aiming at the conservation of water resources. The factors used were the land-use adequacy, soil erodibility, erosivity, proximity to roads and proximity to the drainage network, all of them represented by raster maps, where each factor was standardized to a 256-value continuous scale. The factor weights were determined with the help of a pairwise comparison matrix. Factors aggregation was performed in a raster-based GIS, with the methods under evaluation. In the case of the Ordered Weighted Averaging, two different scenarios, regarding the levels of risk and trade-off among factors, were studied. The results obtained were maps of priority areas, with levels of priority represented on a continuous way, from 0 to 255. In order to make it easy the visualization and also the analysis of the results generated by the three scenarios, the maps were re-classified, to show only five levels of priority, from very low through very high. From the results obtained it was possible to conclude that the Multicriteria Evaluation, in a GIS environment, fits well to the mapping of priority areas for forest restoration, aiming at the conservation of water resources, and that the method of Ordered Weighted Averaging is the more adequate to the prioritization of areas, due to its flexibility, accommodating the concept of trade-off among factors. Such characteristic allows a more detailed mapping of the priority areas, which results smaller and more numerous than the ones generated by the Weighted Linear Combination.

Governments and non-governmental organizations have widely recognized tidal wetland restoration as a sustainable instrument to lessen the threat of climate change, which is reflected by the expansion of the spatial scale of coastal restoration projects. However, approaches to large-scale spatial planning of tidal wetland restoration remain sparse. Previous studies on site selection for restoration planning have focused on the potential supply of ecosystem services (ES) or restoration feasibility with less emphasis on the mitigation of the status of regional ES supply and demand mismatches. We developed a five-step workflow based on systematic conservation planning to identify priority areas for tidal wetland restoration and applied it to the coastal reclaimed areas of Shanghai, China. With this workflow, we analyzed the changes in spatial distribution and the potential ecosystem services supply and restoration costs of priority areas between the two different scenarios of ES demand ignored and ES demand considered. Results showed that the potential restorable areas only accounted for 31.4% (425.2 km²) of the original reclaimed area because of other land use demands (e.g., permanent basic farmland conservation). We extracted 50% of the potential restorable areas as priority areas based on Aichi Target 15. Compared with the ES demand-ignored scenario, the ES demand scenario resulted in a substantial increase in the priority areas of Baoshan District (~177%) and Pudong New Area (~15%) and a small decrease in Chongming District (~4%). No significant change in the potential ES supply for all priority areas was observed between the two scenarios. However, the total restoration cost of the ES demand scenario is 10% higher than that of the ES demand-ignored scenario. Our study highlights the importance of considering the status of regional ES supply and demand (mis)matches in large-scale spatial planning for tidal wetland restoration.

Resource exploitation and rapid urbanization in coal mining areas with a high groundwater table (CMA-HGT) have created double pressure on regional ecological security and increased the vulnerability of the ecological environment. Ecological restoration should be carried out to balance the relationship between economic development and ecological and environmental protection. An ecological security pattern (ESP) can identify key locations that are critical to maintaining ecosystem service stability and landscape connectivity, with territories displaying relatively high vulnerability identified as priority areas for ecological restoration. The Jining planning area (JPA), a typical representative of CMA-HGT, was taken as the study area. To construct the integrated ESP, ecological sources were identified by measuring the importance of multiple ecosystem services and landscape connectivity. Then, the ecological resistance surface was constructed, and the ecological corridors, pinch points, and barriers were determined using circuit theory. Ecological vulnerability (EV) evaluation was performed from the perspectives of natural factors and human activities. The study results showed that the spatial superposition of ESP and EV can effectively identify priority areas for ecological restoration. The ecological restoration priority areas for ecological sources, ecological corridors, and ecological pinch points were 44.56 km2, 11.7 km2, and 9.96 km2, respectively, and corresponding restoration strategies were proposed. Some valuable references were provided for the identification and restoration of priority areas for ecological restoration in CMA-HGT.

Determining priority areas for territorial ecological restoration in the arid region of Northwest China based on the holistic protection and systematic governance is an important measure to build solid national ecological security barrier and promote the construction of territorial ecological civilization. Taking Zhangye City, a typical arid area city in Northwest China, as an example, we constructed the research framework of "ecological network-ecological sensitivities-ecological degradation" from two aspects of internal defects and external threats of ecological networks by using circuit theory and assessment methods of ecological service function importance, ecological sensitivity, and ecological degradation. We then identified the priority areas of territorial ecological restoration in northwest arid region and put forward the restoration strategies. The results showed that the priority areas of ecological restoration in Zhangye City were concentrated in the artificial shelterbelt along rivers and the plain-desert-oasis transition zone with fragile ecology and strong human interference. The ecological network of the study area included 39 ecological sources and 99 ecological corridors, and the highly sensitive and degraded areas were 1595.40 and 6.65 km2. Based on the internal defects and external threats of the ecological network, we identified 31 ecological pinch points, 7 obstacle points, and 753.56 km2 ecological source areas in the territorial spatial ecological restoration priority area. These areas were related to the connectivity of the ecological network internally and the stability maintenance of the ecosystem outwards, and were the areas to restoration in the future. Following the concept of overall protection and system restoration of territorial space, we put forward the idea of territorial space restoration by integrating internal defects and external threats of ecological network, which could provide scientific decision-making basis for comprehensive ecosystem management and territorial optimization of Zhangye City.

Restoration action is critical to ensure a safe environment for humans. Reasonable planning is essential to optimize the efficiency of ecological restoration inputs and outputs when implementing restoration measures. In this study, a method that combines human activity intensity assessment and multi-criteria decision analysis to determine ecological restoration priority (ERP) areas was developed to identify priority and feasible areas for ecological restoration in Shaanxi Province in 2020. The results showed that the total area involved in restoration feasibility assessment in Shaanxi is 10.89 × 104 km2. Among them, the percentage of regions with low feasibility (less than 0.2) is 68.86%, mainly located in Qinling area. High feasibility areas (more than 0.6) accounted for 2.47%, mainly located in the Loess Plateau area of northern Shaanxi. The spatial distribution of the human activity intensity is concentrated in urban areas and extended with the distribution of roads. In total, 10.69% of the regions showed high and very high intensity of human activity, including the Guanzhong urban agglomeration region. This study identified 6078 km2 and 671 km2 of medium and high ecological restoration priority areas, which are more concentrated in the north of the study area. The need for ecological restoration work is even more urgent in northern Shaanxi. In general, the framework in this study has spatially located the priority and feasible areas for restoration, and may provide a useful reference for landscape-scale spatial conservation planning.

The Chilean Patagonian forest is one of the most important productivity biomes in the world and is part of the largest area of intact temperate forests in the southern hemisphere. In Western Patagonia, in the Aysén Region, the natural regeneration of the 4 million ha of forest burned has been poor or null, with soils exposed to intensive hydric and eolic erosion processes, in addition to the invasion of exotic species and overgrazing. These factors of deforestation and degradation of natural vegetation represent a serious and permanent threat with unknown consequences on the landscape capacity to provide ecosystem services. To mitigate or reverse these processes, ecosystem restoration is now recognized as a global priority. Ecosystem services (ES) are increasingly used as a tool to approach these challenges by integrating both ecological and social values in ecological restoration at large scales. Given economic resources to undertake ecological restoration at large scales are often scarce, a tool to effectively prioritize sites for restoration and enhance multiple ES supply and human well-being is critical. In this chapter we address a conceptual model of prioritization of restoration areas for the provision of ES and an approach to their quantification in Patagonia-Aysén. We address a conceptual prioritization model of restoration areas and an approach for quantification of ES provision. We propose to integrate socio-ecological variables, considering the social feasibility of restoration activities, improving human health and well-being, as well as biodiversity and nature conservation values. This method is based on the following sequential steps: (i) defining target areas for restoration and socio-ecological criteria; (ii) assessing the ecological suitability and the social feasibility of restoration; and (iii) combining suitability and feasibility maps to identify priority areas for forest restoration. After defining priority areas for forest restoration and implement restoration actions, the next challenge corresponds to determine their effects on ES. Through measuring and monitoring, ES will be possible to lead to better planning decisions to support both biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service delivery, among others. This method can support policy guidance and promote initiatives to reverse or mitigate the degradation processes that affect forest ecosystems and the associated environments, in general, and Patagonia, in particular.

Identifying ecological security patterns to prioritize conservation and restoration：A case study in Xishuangbanna tropical region, China

Extensive ecosystem restoration is increasingly seen as being central to conserving biodiversity1 and stabilizing the climate of the Earth2. Although ambitious national and global targets have been set, global priority areas that account for spatial variation in benefits and costs have yet to be identified. Here we develop and apply a multicriteria optimization approach that identifies priority areas for restoration across all terrestrial biomes, and estimates their benefits and costs. We find that restoring 15% of converted lands in priority areas could avoid 60% of expected extinctions while sequestering 299gigatonnes of CO2-30% of the total CO2 increase in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. The inclusion of several biomes is key to achieving multiple benefits. Cost effectiveness can increase up to 13-fold when spatial allocation is optimized using our multicriteria approach, which highlights the importance of spatial planning. Our results confirm the vast potential contributions of restoration to addressing global challenges, while underscoring the necessity of pursuing these goals synergistically.