Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes & CHANGE - Global Change and Sustainability Institute, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande, C2, Piso 5, 1749-016, Lisboa, Portugal.
Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes & CHANGE - Global Change and Sustainability Institute, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande, C2, Piso 5, 1749-016, Lisboa, Portugal.
J Environ Manage. 2024 Aug;366:121736. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2024.121736. Epub 2024 Jul 7.
Achieving global restoration targets poses challenges including the need for long-term research and effective monitoring of success, fostering collaborations across diverse fields and actors, ensuring the availability of suitable reference ecosystems, and securing sustained funding. Yet, these conditions are often lacking, limiting the effectiveness of restoration. We provide an overview of ecological restoration practices in the pan-European region of the Long-term Ecological Research Network (eLTER) and demonstrate the importance of eLTER and its potential contributions to support the implementation of the EU Nature Restoration Law. We developed an online questionnaire to collect information on eLTER restoration experts and restoration projects details including the use of eLTER contributions (e.g. infrastructure, data and knowledge), between November 2021 and March 2022. We identified 62 restoration experts and 42 restoration projects from 18 countries. Our results show that eLTER restoration expertise covers most of the European habitats, diverse degradation states and restoration techniques. Most restoration projects (78%) involved long-term monitoring exceeding the average project lifespan, which has proven necessary to achieve restoration success. No common protocol was used for monitoring and evaluation or cost-benefit estimates, but respondents reported effective projects, mostly financed from national funds, and benefits in five ecosystem services on average covered per project. Key eLTER contributions included providing reference ecosystems, biotic and abiotic background data, and interdisciplinary discussion or stakeholder management. Ecological restoration is time intensive and requires long-term research and monitoring standardization to fully understand the restoration process and to ensure comparability across ecosystems. The eLTER network can help address these challenges providing added-value contributions through its infrastructure, long-term datasets, diversity of expertise and strategies that can help identify best restoration practices and support the EU Nature Restoration Law. Finally, additional and long-term funding from the EU and the private sector is needed to achieve global larger-scale restoration targets.
实现全球恢复目标面临诸多挑战，包括需要长期研究和有效监测成功，促进不同领域和行为者之间的合作，确保合适的参照生态系统的可用性，以及确保持续的资金投入。然而，这些条件往往缺乏，限制了恢复的有效性。我们提供了欧洲长期生态研究网络（eLTER）泛欧地区生态恢复实践的概述，并展示了 eLTER 的重要性及其为支持实施欧盟自然恢复法做出贡献的潜力。我们开发了一个在线问卷，收集 eLTER 恢复专家和恢复项目的详细信息，包括使用 eLTER 贡献（例如基础设施、数据和知识）的信息，收集时间为 2021 年 11 月至 2022 年 3 月。我们从 18 个国家确定了 62 名恢复专家和 42 个恢复项目。我们的结果表明，eLTER 恢复专业知识涵盖了欧洲大部分的栖息地、多样化的退化状态和恢复技术。大多数恢复项目（78%）涉及长期监测，监测时间超过了项目平均寿命，这已被证明是实现恢复成功的必要条件。没有使用共同的监测和评估或成本效益估计协议，但受访者报告说，这些项目有效，主要由国家资金资助，平均每个项目覆盖五个生态系统服务的效益。关键的 eLTER 贡献包括提供参照生态系统、生物和非生物背景数据，以及跨学科讨论或利益相关者管理。生态恢复是一项需要大量时间的工作，需要长期研究和监测标准化，以充分了解恢复过程，并确保生态系统之间的可比性。eLTER 网络可以通过其基础设施、长期数据集、专业知识多样性和策略提供增值贡献，这些策略可以帮助确定最佳恢复实践，并支持欧盟自然恢复法。最后，需要欧盟和私营部门提供额外的和长期的资金，以实现全球更大规模的恢复目标。
