Socio-Ecological Outcomes and Monitoring of Restoration in Mosaic Dry Forest-Grassland Ecosystems (ECO-DRYFOREST)

In the last decade, restoring degraded ecosystems has emerged as a global policy priority. At its best, restoration has the potential to contribute to major global policy goals, such as carbon sequestration for climate mitigation, reduced biodiversity loss, and improved well-being of poor people. Yet, evidence about the socio-environmental outcomes of restoration and their drivers in different contexts and geographies, as well as the tradeoffs restoration programs face between different social and ecological objectives and between local and global sustainability needs is scant.

​”ECO-DRYFOREST” is a research-education project that aimed at investigating the Ecological and Community Outcomes of Mosaic Dry Forests-Grasslands Restoration, with the focus to understand tradeoffs between different social and ecological restoration objectives at multiple scales.

It focuses particularly on (sub)tropical dryland forest-grassland ecosystems, which are found in many countries that have pledged to restore millions of hectares of degraded ecosystems. These ecosystems, however, do not receive the needed attention in restoration discourses for their particularities.  These landscapes face distinct social-ecological tradeoffs due to the complex interactions of grassland and woodland covers and their relationships with anthropogenic and natural fire and herbivory.

ECO-DRYFOREST will contribute to a broader, integrative understanding of how such types of landscapes are transformed through restoration by multiple stakeholders and associated outcomes by (i) examining how (and what) institutions and people shape ecosystem integrity through restoration; (ii) examining how restored landscapes impact people’s livelihoods, food security, and climate adaptation; and (iii) generating and test a broadly applicable and policy-relevant, multi-scalar assessment and monitoring approach. The project will also emphasize science-policy engagement, working with both researchers and restoration practitioners and policy implementers at the local, regional, and international levels.