Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, Regent's Park, NW1 4RY, London, UK; Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, South Kensington, SW7 2AZ, London, UK.
Endangered Landscapes Programme, Cambridge Conservation Initiative, The David Attenborough Building, Cambridge, CB2 3QZ, UK.
J Environ Manage. 2022 Nov 15;322:116003. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.116003. Epub 2022 Sep 5.
Active and passive restoration are both increasingly considered as options for nature recovery, with potential to help address the current climate and biodiversity crises. So far, however, there is little practical information on how to gauge the benefits and limitations of each approach, in terms of their effects on large-scale ecosystem composition, structure, and functioning. To address this knowledge gap, this study used satellite remote sensing to investigate changes in land cover and primary productivity within the forests of the Făgăraș Mountains in southern Romania, where large-scale restoration and land abandonment have simultaneously taken place across the past two decades. To our knowledge, this study is the first to contrast the impacts of active and passive restoration within a single landscape on components of ecosystem structure and functioning at such temporal and spatial scales. Results show active restoration activities to be very effective at facilitating the recovery of cleared forests in small parts of the landscapes; but they also highlight substantial areas of natural forest expansion following agricultural abandonment, in line with regional trends. Altogether, our approach clearly illustrates how freely available satellite data can (1) provide vital spatially explicit insights about large-scale and long-term transformations in ecosystem composition, structure and functioning; and (2) help contrast the impacts of restoration approaches on vegetation distribution and dynamics, in ways that complement existing ground-based studies.
主动和被动恢复都越来越被视为自然恢复的选择，可以帮助应对当前的气候和生物多样性危机。然而，到目前为止，关于如何衡量每种方法的效益和局限性的实际信息很少，这些方法在大规模生态系统组成、结构和功能方面的影响。为了弥补这一知识空白，本研究利用卫星遥感技术调查了罗马尼亚南部法格拉什山脉森林的土地覆盖和初级生产力的变化，在过去二十年中，大规模恢复和土地废弃同时在整个地区发生。据我们所知，本研究首次在单一景观中对比了主动和被动恢复对生态系统结构和功能组成部分的影响，达到了这种时间和空间的尺度。研究结果表明，主动恢复活动在小部分景观中非常有效地促进了已开垦森林的恢复；但它们也突出显示了在农业废弃之后自然森林的大面积扩张，与区域趋势一致。总的来说，我们的方法清楚地说明了免费提供的卫星数据如何：(1) 提供有关生态系统组成、结构和功能的大规模和长期变化的重要空间明确见解；(2) 帮助对比恢复方法对植被分布和动态的影响，以补充现有的基于地面的研究。
