The power of data synthesis to shape the future of the restoration community and capacity

January 28, 2021

As a part of the Journal of Restoration Ecology’s super cool (if we do say so ourselves) Re-New Initiative we have written a short communication outlining the immense international targets set for ecological restoration over the coming years and how compiling and synthesizing data can potentially help.

We discuss data synthesis as being complementary to field‐based research in ecology, which can be further leveraged to improve predictive capacity in ecological restoration. We outline how synthesis in restoration has the power to bring together the global restoration community, to find patterns linked to shared practices, and important gaps that need rapid attention.




International targets that have been set for global restoration. Regional initiatives are land pledged to be restored as a part of the Bonn Challenge and the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Source

We further outline the Global Restore Project and Global Arid Zone Project and show how we are aligning the effort with existing trait and climate data, and how we are structuring our data collection.

Two emerging examples of curated restoration databases are the Global Restore Project (GRP) and the Global Arid Zone Project (GAZP). This figure shows the coordinated consistent structure of each in blue and their coordinated connections to existing global databases in green. Source

Read the full article: Emma Ladouceur & Nancy Shackelford (2020). The power of data synthesis to shape the future of the restoration community and capacity. Restoration Ecology


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