About

Restoration of degraded landscapes is a proposed strategy and a high policy priority to address interlinked crises of deforestation and land degradation, biodiversity loss, water stress, and climate change while achieving economic and social benefits. As such, restoration actions, also packaged as nature-based solutions, are expected to deliver both social and ecological benefits, including the recovery of biodiversity and other ecosystem functions and services that support natural resource-based livelihoods and food security, as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Yet, little empirical evidence exists about what restoration programs achieve as outcomes, the drivers of those outcomes, and what tradeoffs exist between global and local sustainability goals and needs.

This research project seeks to fill these knowledge gaps by investigating how and why restoration programs transform landscapes and livelihoods in dryland forest-grassland ecosystems, which 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. The project investigates how restoration changes ecological and social conditions, identifies what drives the ecological and social changes induced by restoration, and develops cost-effective indicators and tools to advance systematic assessment of socio-environmental benefits/tradeoffs of restoration interventions.

The research hypotheses that effective restoration involves significant tradeoffs between ecological and social goals and is the result of the interplay of other forces, including participatory governance, land rights, and technical capacity. It adopts a land change system perspective and integrates theories of landscape ecology, governance systems, and impact evaluation to examine the multi-scalar socio-environmental system of dryland forest-grassland mosaics. As such, it employs multiple methods, including remote sensing, field-based ecological measurements of biodiversity and carbon storage, household surveys, interviews, and focus group discussions to address globally important critical knowledge gaps in restoration science.

By generating empirical evidence and insights about restoration governance processes and outcomes, the research will contribute to advance understanding and application of restoration as a nature-based solution. Beyond its scientific merits, the research aims to reinforce the science-policy-society interface in restoration efforts and contribute to graduate/undergraduate education.