Planning restoration in human-modified landscapes: New insights linking different scales

Abstract

The transformation of tropical ecosystems by humans have resulted in forest loss, which, in turn, have caused negative impacts on biodiversity and the provisioning of ecosystem services. There is an urgent need to plan the restoration of these human-modified landscapes, using methodological approaches that consider key processes occurring at different spatial scales while engage local community participation, offering them the best possibilities of tangible benefits. In this study, was evaluated the landscape spatial pattern and local conservation status of existing forest remnants, showing an analysis of possible restoration scenarios for a human-modified landscape in La Montaña, an indigenous region in southwestern Mexico. Therefore, landscape and local scale approaches were linked to identify specific landscape elements where efforts to improve connectivity must be concentrated. Also, this approach allowed finding a set of species from reference sites that showed the best socioecological characteristics to be used in different restoration strategies. As expected, La Montaña region showed a spatial pattern typical of highly human-modified landscapes, i.e., several small (<21 ha) and irregular forest remnants with strong forest edge effects. Furthermore, these small and irregular forest fragments displayed forest structure, diversity and composition characteristics similar to those communities disturbed by selective harvesting or in an early successional phase. However, about 100 of woody species were found inside the fragments, some with important potential to provide ecosystem services. The landscape connectivity was very low, and an analysis of possible restoration scenarios showed that is equally important to restore the productive areas as well as open forest, to recover up to 47% of landscape connectivity. In this sense, it was proposed a productive restoration strategy to enrich open forests and create biodiversity-friendly habitat in agricultural areas, using species with high socioecological potential. We believe that the same approach could be applied to other highly human-modified tropical landscapes with similar socioecological problems.