Towards a comprehensive evaluation and mechanistic perspective on grassland restoration

Résumé fourni par la source

Grassland degradation driven by land-use intensification has caused severe declines in biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and service provision worldwide. Effective restoration strategies are urgently needed to combat global grassland degradation. Such restoration strategies should achieve a comprehensive recovery of grasslands, i.e., revers anthropogenic degradation with regard to a broad set of ecosystem attributes. Practical restoration ecology shows that the effectiveness of certain restoration activities usually varies with site-specific context, which complicates the prediction of restoration outcomes and the identification of optimal restoration strategies. We highlight that an ecological theory-based, comprehensive and mechanistic perspective enables a holistic understanding of restoration processes and ultimately the development of credible scenarios for expected restoration outcomes to inform policy and stakeholder decisions. In this review, we take initial steps towards a more comprehensive and mechanistic perspective on grassland restoration. We propose four overarching restoration goals aligned with international standards, each reflecting key ecosystem attributes. To operationalize these goals, we identify a set of quantitative indicators - including above- and belowground parameters - with a strong focus on indicators that may enhance mechanistic understanding of restoration processes. We argue that advancing mechanistic understanding will improve the reliability, transferability, and context-sensitivity of restoration planning. Moreover, it is essential for selecting indicators that allow a comprehensive evaluation of restoration success. To facilitate the development of such a mechanistic understanding we outline a conceptual model of potential causal linkages between ecosystem attributes, which may serve as blueprint for more sophisticated predictive models.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.