Convergence and divergence in science and practice of urban and rural forest restoration.

Forest restoration has never been higher on policymakers' agendas. Complex and multi-dimensional arrangements across the urban-rural continuum challenge restorationists and require integrative approaches to strengthen environmental protection and increase restoration outcomes. It remains unclear if urban and rural forest restoration are moving towards or away from each other in practice and research, and whether comparing research outcomes can help stakeholders to gain a clearer understanding of the interconnectedness between the two fields. This study aims to identify the challenges and opportunities for enhancing forest restoration in both urban and rural systems by reviewing the scientific evidence, engaging with key stakeholders and using an urban-rural forest restoration framework. Using the Society for Ecological Restoration's International Principles as discussion topics, we highlight aspects of convergence and divergence between the two fields to broaden our understanding of forest restoration and promote integrative management approaches to address future forest conditions. Our findings reveal that urban and rural forest restoration have convergent and divergent aspects. We emphasise the importance of tailoring goals and objectives to specific contexts and the need to design different institutions and incentives based on the social and ecological needs and goals of stakeholders in different regions. Additionally, we discuss the challenges of achieving high levels of ecological restoration and the need to go beyond traditional ecology to plan, implement, monitor, and adaptively manage restored forests. We suggest that rivers and watersheds could serve as a common ground linking rural and urban landscapes and that forest restoration could interact with other environmental protection measures. We note the potential for expanding the creative vision associated with increasing tree-containing environments in cities to generate more diverse and resilient forest restoration outcomes in rural settings. This study underscores the value of integrative management approaches in addressing future forest conditions across the urban-rural continuum. Our framework provides valuable insights for policymakers, researchers, and decision-makers to advance the field of forest restoration and address the challenges of restoration across the urban-rural continuum. The rural-urban interface serves as a convergence point for forest restoration, and both urban and rural fields can benefit from each other's expertise.

Biodiversity responses to restoration across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration is focussing attention and resources on restoration globally. Nowhere is this more crucial than in tropical forests that harbor immense biodiversity, but have also undergone widespread deforestation over the past few decades. We performed a meta-analysis to investigate how biodiversity features respond to forest restoration across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (BAF), one of the most threatened biodiversity hotspots in the world. We assembled biodiversity in different metrics of structure and diversity features of three taxonomic groups (vascular plants, soil microorganisms, and invertebrates), generating a dataset with 2370 observations from 76 primary studies. We quantified the incomplete recovery of biodiversity (i.e., the rate of recovery to a pre-disturbance state) occurring during the restoration process, which we called the 'recovery gap'. Our results revealed that forests undergoing restoration in the BAF show a recovery gap of 34% for structure features and 22% for diversity features in comparison to reference reforests, considering all taxonomic groups investigated. For vascular plants, soil microorganisms, and invertebrates the recovery gap ranged between 46 and 47%, 16-26%, and 4-7%, respectively. Overall, the recovery gap was influenced by the interaction of restoration actions (i.e., the past land use, restoration age and restoration approach - active and passive restoration), however, structure features responded more sensitively to the time elapsed since restoration started, while the recovery gap for diversity features depended more on the past land-use. Our study can help guide the prioritization of the aforenamed taxonomic groups in restoration, the regulation of potential biodiversity offsetting policies in the BAF, and understanding how coupled biodiversity features respond to the interaction of environmental conditions and restoration actions in a high fragmented tropical landscape.