It seems to me that the global discourse and agenda around land restoration has a strong bias toward forest ecosystems. Are other types of ecosystems (wetlands, rangelands, tundra, peatlands, etc.) under-represented in land restoration activities? Does the bias toward trees contribute to inappropriate interventions? I am wondering if anyone has done an analysis that can provide evidence to confirm or debunk my suspicion.
- From regions in the temperate zone that I know intimately substantial areas of peat bog (abandoned open cast peat mining),
- river floodplains (flood protection),
- heath (abandoned rangeland) and
- forest (abandoned farmland)
are regenerating/restored over the past decades. For forest we measured a pace of 1%/year in area extent.
Forest may be, or seem to be dominant in the global discourse and agenda because of its strong institutional base in terms of
- tenure (state forests),
- forest departments/ministries; without equivalent rangeland or peat departments),
- legislation (forest law and regulations) and
- profession (forest school/universities; foresters and forest engineers).
I am not so sure you will find an unbiased meta-analysis, and I am also not very convinced that your question (will a bias lead to unjustified interventions) will lead to a productive piece of research or possibly policy justification. When I worked on seagrasses I was amazed at how many people worked on coral reefs, and when I started to work on wetlands I found how well these also had trickled up or maybe down into NGO circles (the Ramsar Convention and Wetlands International for example). I suggest you scan the literature on river restoration and then conclude that most restoration projects fail in their BACI design (Bernhard et al 2005 Science), and managers implementing such projects decide that these projects are a success anyway based on pure gut feeling (Jahnig et al, 2011 Ecol Applic). But do a literature meta analysis and see whether you can operationalise your feeling of a bias into a testable hypothesis. ( :
I just finished the book of Diana Davis: The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge. (2016). Cambridge (MA): MIT press. I highly recommend it. I think it is very relevant for your inquiry.
A very good recent perspective is available here:
https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.13109
Here is another by William Bond that may be relevant:
Article The deforestation story: Testing for anthropogenic origins o...
Thanks to those of you who commented, shared related papers, etc. William Bond paper (recommended by Christopher I. Roos ) was very interesting and I hope to get to some of the other recommendations soon. While I haven't found any kind of systematic study of pro-forest/anti-rangeland bias, I have collected some thoughts on the topic and turned them into a blog post: "Are all ecosystems meant to be forests?" (http://landscapewanderer.link/all-ecosystems-forests/).
Thank you very much for the well-worded question. I also noticed that the forest is given excessive attention. Moreover, closed forests are valued. At the same time, there are absolutely no conservation programs for park forests (with sparse forest stands, with a large role for grasses). Minimum attention to meadows in the forest zone. But it is meadows that are now greatly reducing the area in the temperate zone, due to reformatting of agriculture.
It was nice to see this issue acknowledged in short BBC info-piece: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-49111179/deforestation-what-s-wrong-with-planting-new-forests.
The research of Sergei Zimov and Nikita Zimov is also pretty interesting in that sense, at high latitudes that we are not so used to work with https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/pleistocene-park/517779/
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