I have not got any relevant expertise in the forest sciences and I do not let me to myself to talk about one. But I would like to tell you something. The three words "Restoration, Rehabilitation and Reclamation" are jointly synonymous in verbal and vocabulary. However, they have different specialized meanings in natural resource sciences. Be sure to consider this issue in mind in your research studies.

Regards

Forest restoration is a conscious effort to replace want mankind has destroyed. In order sense to even help in the reproduction of some special species. It should be a national policy for all countries.

Can a request good title for review paper on forest restoration.

Regards

FIRST: Make a list of the plants NATIVE to Fiji (or wherever you are doing your project) and also a list of those that were introduced... and NEVER plant any of the introduced species.

SECOND Start at the bottom and work your way up... with the pioneering species. For example, if a forest area has been clearcut, what species regrow quickly that are natives? Usually the grasses and annual plants first.

THIRD, work with a soil test lab... and find the soil nutrient needs are for each species that you want to regrow in an area. Every plant on the planet, has its own soil nutrient threshold, and in order to get the plants back that you want, need to make sure that the soil is prepared to feed them with the adequate nutrients they need to survive. A lot of failures in restoration is due to the lack of adequate nutrients for the plants,

You can test this idea by putting soil into containers... and plant native seeds, and water daily. If they can grow to maturity then you might be OK, but if they starve and die, you need to add something that is missing.

FOURTH, plant so that you get 100% native cover in only one year--any bare soil means your method is still not correct.

Using those four basic rules, has allowed me to restore 800 acres of native areas here in California since 1992, back to 95% or better native cover.

What forest are you asking about in what country? Can you post some pictures of an area you want to try and restore, with a picture of what a pristine forest should look like?

I am posting an example of my work, the before-and-after here, a California grassland full of exotic weed grasses, and then the wildflowers restored as the original native cover. A few pictures of the forest you are working on might give you better answers to your question.

Hello,

You could start here : https://www.ser.org/default.aspx

https://www.decadeonrestoration.org/

and by taking a look at James Aronson's work on the subject : https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Aronson-4

Regards

Can you indicate what kind of forest in what country, and then if Fiji, post a few start-pictures and what you want to see as the finished project?

I wanted to add two things that I am finding here in California. 1.) Sometimes there are dormant native seeds in the soil, that can only be germinated by having the proper amount of organic matter and nutrients in the soil. Do soil tests and if the nitrogen, phosphorus, or calcium are low in forests that were logged in the past, or organic matter, add those and see if it speeds up germination of seeds that are still in the soil in small scale test plots, like one by two meters for each treatment.

In many cases, I have 5,000-10,000 dormant native seeds per square meter, but they refuse to sprout until I have added nutrients to match those plant's thresholds they need for seedling survival. Just last week, we added 600 kg. of organic fertilizer on only 3,500 square meters, to replace the nutrient that were removed by 150 years of cattle grazing in the grassland in Woodside, CA shown above.

Also, 2.) Make sure and add the Pseudomonas host plants that create the rain clouds for your forest. You can replant an entire forest and when you leave out the Pseudomonas host plants, you have forgotten the plants that make the rain that make that forest thrive. Picture attached of what a new rain cloud looks like that is produced from the Pseudomonas getting airborne from the host plant it lives on. You can find those plants right after a rain event stops, and you will see the Pseudomonas get airborne and making a new raincloud. That is what all of the pictures of a "Cloud Forest" are, those are Pseudomonas clouds made of bacteria, and should be called "Cumulus botanicus" in the future.

Read https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/does-rain-come-from-life-in-the-clouds

The issue about writing a review article vs doing a small scale project, is you will find that since Ecological Restoration is a new science..., only about 40 years old, there is not much useful scientific literature, because a lot of the work has been done by non-academics who never wrote peer reviewed articles. The other issue, is the scientific approach to ecological restoration vs the local cultural and religious approach can be very different. For example the Jains in India have a very different relationship to their Sacred Groves in the Western Ghats in India, than a scientist coming in from the outside and doing a restoration project.

I worked with a man from Fiji a few years ago, who was about to chop down some forest to produce a plantation, and he told me about the "rain trees" that produce the rain clouds, and I suggested that the forest be preserved, and sell carbon credits to Europe instead.

That is why it would be more useful to get a grant and do some small scale projects yourself, and produce that peer reviewed article yourself?

Why not look into getting job in Saudi Arabia working on the "Saudi Green Initiative" replanting the entire country with 10 BILLION trees at the rate of one million per week, for the next 200 years. You could start a job that your 10x great grandchildren would still be working on in 2222?

That is a project I helped get started 20 years ago with my website at https://www.ecoseeds.com/cool.html

If you add the study of grass phytoliths to you paleobotany interests, that would be very valuable if you were going to get a job in a place like Saudi Arabia, where the ecosystem was wiped out hundreds to thousands of years ago,

And without looking at the phytolith fossils, that project will have a difficult time determining what species needed to be replanted where, The Saudi plan to replant 10 billion trees within 200 years is an excellent goal, but the understory of grasses and wildflowers need to be replanted also to have a thriving ecosystem at the end of the day. Whenever people replant native forests, the understory is usually forgotten and not paid attention to. You can see where I have put together photo-examples of that entire country at Raw Data Saudi Arabia Megatransect Northern section

Raw Data Saudi Arabia Megatransect Southern region

A project like that absolutely needs a paleobotanist to look at the plant fossils in the soil, to determine what is missing so it can be put back correctly.

I did a painting of all of the different plant families that needs to be included, when doing a complete Ecological Restoration make-over when planting trees, like for the "Saudi Green" project, or the "Great Green Wall" that is getting planted across the Sahel right now. In addition to the trees, here is a list of the other native plants that need to be planted at the same time, using Arabia as an example: Bean, Borage, Buckwheat, Caper, Cucumber, Dogbane, Goosefoot, Grass, Iris, Lily, Mallow, Milkweed, Mint, Morning glory, Mustard, Nightshade, Parsley, Poppy, Rose, Sedge, and Sunflower. Painting with full title is at https://www.ecoseeds.com/art4.html as #62.

https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/11/9/938

https://faolex.fao.org/docs/pdf/ins107031.pdf

https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/services/technical-development-services/technical-development-services-land-reclamation/

https://www.greenvestus.com/2019/10/22/what-are-the-different-techniques-for-forest-restoration/

https://bmcecol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6785-11-29

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11666

Regards

Instead of writing a review, write an article about the largest tree replanting project on the planet, that got started last year--first with the Saudi Green Initiative which is planting one million trees per WEEK, for a total of 10 billion trees.

Then in November, at COP27 the Saudis hosted an expansion of the project, to include 24 countries to plant 50 BILLION trees as the "Middle East Green Initiative". There is a YouTube video of their session at COP27.

The meeting at COP27 was hosted by the Saudis at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xry733Z-Q4

It misses a few minutes of the beginning and runs a little over one hour.

That initiative was started with my proposal at https://www.ecoseeds.com/cool.html that was adopted by the Saudis in August 2010 to set aside 200 million hectares to replant native plants.

The Saudi Green Initiative website shows the huge nurseries where the millions of trees are being grown to plant.