A new era in forest restoration monitoring

TLDR

Ecological restoration monitoring has traditionally relied on detailed field plots, but recent technological advances now enable unprecedented shifts in planning, implementation, and monitoring, making effective monitoring essential for the success of ambitious restoration programs. The authors argue that new paradigms are needed to achieve large‑scale, long‑lasting restoration, and propose that a new generation of restoration ecologists using emerging technologies can revolutionize monitoring in the coming years. They propose that new remote‑sensing approaches, applied to restoration, expand capacity to assess performance across unprecedented spatial and temporal scales, with a new generation of remote‑sensing scientists driving large‑scale monitoring.

Abstract

Monitoring ecological restoration has been historically dependent on traditional inventory methods based on detailed information obtained from field plots. New paradigms are now needed to successfully achieve restoration as a large‐scale, long‐lasting transformative process. Fortunately, advances in technology now allow for unprecedented shifts in the way restoration has been planned, implemented, and monitored. Here, we describe our vision on how the use of new technologies by a new generation of restoration ecologists may revolutionize restoration monitoring in the coming years. The success of the many ambitious restoration programs planned for the coming decade will rely on effective monitoring, which is an essential component of adaptive management and accountability. The development of new remote sensing approaches and their application to a restoration context open new avenues for expanding our capacity to assess restoration performance over unprecedented spatial and temporal scales. A new generation of scientists, which have a background in remote sensing but are getting more and more involved with restoration, will certainly play a key role for making large‐scale restoration monitoring a viable human endeavor in the coming decade—the United Nations' decade on ecosystem restoration.