Project description
Assessing the drivers and benefits of natural regeneration in Africa
With 65 % of Africa’s agricultural land degraded, effective restoration is vital. Natural regeneration (NR) allows plants to regrow without planting, but we need to understand its dynamics and benefits better. The ERC-funded REACT project will assess the drivers and benefits of NR in sub-Saharan Africa. It will monitor woody vegetation in 150 agricultural fields in Kenya, examine factors that influence species performance, and use a trait-based approach for evaluation. The project will identify drivers of NR abundance, predict the impacts of climate change, and map restoration potential. Additionally, it will develop a social-ecological framework to integrate social factors with ecological theory, guiding effective NR-based restoration efforts during the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
Objective
The challenge. With 65% of agricultural land in Africa degraded, the need to effectively scale up restoration is evident. Natural regeneration (NR) is a promising restoration solution that depends on vegetation regrowing from seed or tree stumps, without the need to plant trees. However, we do not know what regenerates where and what benefits it may bring. What we do know comes from ecological studies on secondary succession that exclude human influences. This informs restoration poorly since people continuously use, manage and control NR.
Aims. This study aims to 1) evaluate how NR develops over time and what benefits it brings, to 2) explore the optimal social-ecological conditions for NR-based restoration, and 3) predict the current and future NR restoration potential across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Approach. Recent scientific breakthroughs in succession ecology and on-the-ground restoration developments offer exiting opportunities to gain new mechanistic insights into NR dynamics. I will: 1) Monitor woody vegetation in 150 unmanaged and managed agricultural fields across three ecoclimatic zones in Kenya. 2) Measure plot-level environmental and social variables that affect species performance. 3) Employ a trait-based approach to evaluate the relative importance of different regeneration mechanisms and consequences for multiple ecosystem functions. 4) Scale up mechanistic insights using large datasets and identify regional drivers of NR abundance, functional composition and diversity. 5) Predict climate change effects on NR and map current and future NR restoration potential across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Impact. I will develop a mechanistic social-ecological framework for NR by integrating social dimensions into ecological theory, which allows to predict how NR contributes to restoration and where it may need to be complemented with tree planting. This is vital for effectively scaling up restoration during the current UN decade on ecosystem restoration.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2023-STG
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6708 PB Wageningen
Netherlands
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