Local communities prioritize regulating ecosystem services in forest landscape restoration

Background/Question/Methods

Ambitious commitments to restore hundreds of millions of hectares of land are being made to achieve multiple goals, including balancing ecological and social outcomes. Including the preferences of local communities for different ecosystem services (ES), as well as the ecological need for restoration, is key to ensuring the persistence of restored areas over time. The extent to which landscape context affects the mix of ES that local communities prioritize in restoration has been little explored. We assessed which ES local communities prioritized for restoration in landscapes undergoing different global land use transitions — i.e., intensifying vs frontier. We hypothesized, based on the land-use literature, that local community members in the intensifying landscape — dominated by disturbed ecosystems — would be more likely to prefer regulating ES (which are associated with ecological function) than people in the frontier landscape with a higher proportion of undisturbed ecosystems. We collected data from 26 groups of local authorities and community leaders using participatory mapping in the Andes (intensifying) and Amazon (frontier) of Ecuador. We compared (1) the relative frequency of ES selection and (2) the prioritization of ES across restoration site categories in both landscapes.

Results/Conclusions

Participants mapped 122 potential restoration sites which included eight site categories, such as water recharge areas and hedgerows, where participants then identified, and prioritized, a total of 20 regulating, cultural, and provisioning ES classes. Local interest in increasing ES through restoration differed between landscapes (U = 374, z = -2.69, p < 0.05). Overall, participants selected regulating ES more frequently than cultural and provisioning ES in both landscapes, although regulating ES were mentioned more frequently in the intensifying (56%) than the frontier (46%) landscape. Relative frequency of ES selection was different from ES prioritization across site categories in the intensifying landscape (z = -5.585, p < 0.001) and the frontier landscapes (z = -4.375, p < 0.001). For example, the most frequently selected site category in the intensifying landscape was ‘hedgerows’, with ES such as ‘wind protection’, while ‘water recharge areas’ obtained the highest prioritization with the ES ‘water flow regulation’. Restoring water recharge areas requires recovering ecosystems and shows that local communities prioritize long-term restoration of ecosystem function. Soliciting local priorities in restoration can help to tailor restoration strategies which recover biodiversity while meeting socio-economic needs thus improving the likelihood of success of our ambitious global restoration efforts.