Publications by authors named "Alvaro Iribarrem"
Natural forest regrowth is a cost-effective, nature-based solution for biodiversity recovery, yet different socioenvironmental factors can lead to variable outcomes. A critical knowledge gap in forest restoration planning is how to predict where natural forest regrowth is likely to lead to high levels of biodiversity recovery, which is an indicator of conservation value and the potential provisioning of diverse ecosystem services. We sought to predict and map landscape-scale recovery of species richness and total abundance of vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants in tropical and subtropical second-growth forests to inform spatial restoration planning.
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- The post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework aims to stabilize and restore species status, justifying the need for a scalable metric to measure the impact of conservation actions globally.
- The STAR (species threat abatement and restoration) metric assesses how targeted actions like habitat restoration and threat reduction can reduce extinction risks, showing significant contributions from sustainable agriculture and forestry.
- Countries like Indonesia and Brazil hold significant responsibility for biodiversity, as they manage over 31% of the STAR values for key species, while Key Biodiversity Areas, though only 9% of land, represent nearly half of these values.
Extensive ecosystem restoration is increasingly seen as being central to conserving biodiversity and stabilizing the climate of the Earth. Although ambitious national and global targets have been set, global priority areas that account for spatial variation in benefits and costs have yet to be identified. Here we develop and apply a multicriteria optimization approach that identifies priority areas for restoration across all terrestrial biomes, and estimates their benefits and costs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInternational commitments for ecosystem restoration add up to one-quarter of the world's arable land. Fulfilling them would ease global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity decline but could displace food production and impose financial costs on farmers. Here, we present a restoration prioritization approach capable of revealing these synergies and trade-offs, incorporating ecological and economic efficiencies of scale and modelling specific policy options.
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- A meta-analysis of 133 studies shows that natural regeneration outperforms active restoration in achieving biodiversity and vegetation structure success in tropical forests.
- Natural regeneration leads to higher restoration success rates (34-56% for biodiversity and 19-56% for vegetation structure) compared to active restoration when key environmental factors are considered.
- The study challenges the belief that active restoration is superior, suggesting that future restoration policies should incorporate conditions that enhance the effectiveness of both approaches while considering socioeconomic factors.