UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Restoring degraded ecosystems has emerged as a global policy priority to address the interlinked concerns of deforestation and land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change while delivering social benefits, according to the United Nations.

An international team of researchers led by Ida Djenontin, assistant professor of geography at Penn State, was recently awarded a $1.3 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems program to investigate the socioecological outcomes of restoration in degraded woodlands ecosystems.

Ecosystem restoration, anchored in the United Nations’ (UN) Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030, is understood as “the process of halting and reversing degradation, resulting in improved ecosystem services, and recovered biodiversity.”

“Ecosystem restoration is a clear international priority, and it is included in both the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity,” said Djenontin, who also is a co-funded faculty member of the Institutes of Energy and the Environment and the Alliance for Education, Science, Engineering, and Design with Africa. “The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report also endorses restoration as one of the possible solutions for carbon dioxide removal, especially given the potential for soil and biomass carbon removal and storage. Additionally, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework refers to restoration as a way to achieve its targets.”

Ecosystem restoration encompasses a wide continuum of practices, depending on local conditions and societal choice, including ecological restoration but also forest landscape restoration approaches that aim to regain ecological integrity and enhance human well-being in deforested and degraded landscapes.

“Restoration actions are expected to recover biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services that support natural resource-based livelihoods and contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation,” Djenontin said. “But it’s not about restoring to a pristine ideal landscape — rather it's about restoring to the objectives defined by the people living in those landscapes.”

Given the complexities of restoration, especially when considering woodland ecosystems, tradeoffs between social and ecological goals and local and global priorities are not well understood, according to Djenontin.

“So far, however, we know very little, especially from empirical evidence, about what the socio-environmental outcomes of restoration initiatives and their drivers are,” Djenontin said. “Differing interests and priorities from global to national to local scales exist in that some may want to focus on biodiversity conservation or climate mitigation, or others may want to focus on securing the livelihoods and broader human wellbeing of the local communities. We want to know the trade-offs between those different goals, how those trade-offs translate in the design and implementation of restoration programs, and how people are considered and integrated in the restoration processes.”

This project, “Socioecological Outcomes of Restoration in Forest-Grassland Ecosystems,” seeks to address critical knowledge gaps in restoration science that are of global importance. The researchers will focus on interactions and tradeoffs between farmer communities, multiple levels of governance and landscape functionalities — together, these areas form a multi-scalar socio-environmental system of mosaic dry forest-grassland restoration.

The researchers will investigate how restoration changes ecological and social conditions, identify what drives the ecological and social changes induced by restoration, and develop cost-effective indicators and tools to advance systematic assessment of socio-environmental benefits and tradeoffs of restoration interventions.

“We want to contribute to a broader understanding of how woodlands that are being transformed through restoration are achieving desirable social and ecological outcomes,” said Erica Smithwick, distinguished professor of geography and co-principal investigator on the project.

While focusing on Southern Africa as a regional case study, the findings will be applicable to other tropical mosaic dry forest-grassland landscapes, the researchers said.

“Our research has implications specifically for southern Africa but can be applied to other dryland ecosystems that we find widespread across Asia, Africa and the Americas as well as throughout the United States, reflecting a wide relevance,” Djenontin said.

The research will employ multiple methods, including remote sensing, field-based ecological measurements of biodiversity and carbon storage, household surveys, interviews and focus group discussions to address globally important critical knowledge gaps in restoration science.

“We will use interdisciplinary methods, drawing from both ecological and social science methods and governance theories, to assess the social and ecological outcomes,” Smithwick said. “By generating empirical evidence and insights about the socio-ecological outcomes of restoration processes, our research will advance understanding and application of restoration as a nature-based solution in critical ecosystems globally.”

Other investigators on the project include Tong Qiu, assistant professor of ecology at Duke University, and Forrest Fleischman, associate professor of environmental policy at the University of Minnesota. Project collaborators include Wayne Twine, associate professor in the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and Judith Francesca Mangani Kamoto, professor of forestry and rural development at Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources in Malawi.

Non-academic partners, including the Malawi’s Department of Forestry, Conservation South Africa and the African Union Development Agency’s African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AUDA-NEPAD/AFR100 Secretariat), also will collaborate on the project.