1. Assessment

When assessing a forest site for restoration, we suggest you evaluate several critical components to ensure effective planning and implementation. These cover site conditions, including soil conditions, ongoing management, landscape context, baseline monitoring, and reference models. 

For the assessment of site conditions and capability, you must first understand the physical and ecological characteristics of the site. The key factors include soil type and quality (fertility, compaction, drainage etc.), topography (slope steepness and orientation), site history and vegetation cover (presence of native species or invasive plants).  

The broader landscape context will significantly influence your restoration planning and outcomes because of the many interactions with other ecosystems and the importance of connectivity of habitats for the many different species living in the forest and forested landscapes. Thus, things like spatial arrangement of forests, patch size, and closeness to existing natural habitats are crucial for improving biodiversity.  

Landscapes also bring in diverse financial and social aspects, such as income patterns across land-use types or societal demands for recreation particularly close to larger settlements. 

Collecting baseline data of restoration indicators is an essential starting point to follow the restoration progress over time. This may involve gathering pre-intervention data on indicators around carbon stocks, tree species, forest structure, vegetation and animal species, soil health, water regime and quality etc.  

Reference models/conditions can provide benchmarks for restoration goals. They typically compare the site to undisturbed ecosystems or historical conditions in similar/local ecological conditions. With climate change and other increasing threats like new pests and pathogens or invasive species, we recommend you take such historic reference conditions with great caution, particularly when it comes to the question of tree species composition. Aspects like structural diversity, deadwood amounts, and presence of particular species or species groups can, however, give good insights into the historic complexity and resilience of the system to be restored.  

By integrating these elements into the planning process, your restoration projects can maximize ecological benefits while addressing socio-economic constraints effectively.