More than two billion hectares of lost and degraded forest land around the world have been identified as opportunities for forest landscape restoration. Many of these areas will benefit from low cost management approaches such as natural regeneration (unassisted and assisted).

Dr. Robin Chazdon will present on natural regeneration as an opportunity for forest and landscape restoration at scale, building on our increasing knowledge of ecological patterns of spontaneous tropical forest recovery. We will discuss:

  • examples of natural regeneration at scale
  • ways to assist natural regeneration (invasive species suppression, fire protection, planting native species, using forest fragments, attracting wildlife, etc.)
  • ecological memory and successional dynamics in a landscape
  • ways to assess and map the potential for natural regeneration
  • approaches to monitoring

 

Dr. Robin Chazdon

Robin Chazdon is a professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Connecticut, USA. Her research interests include biodiversity conservation, regeneration, and restoration of tropical forests, tropical forest successional dynamics, and biodiversity in human-modified tropical landscapes. Her recent collaborative research focuses on species composition and functional diversity of woody species in naturally regenerating tropical forests. She heads a multi-investigator project on long-term secondary forest dynamics in Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, and Brazil. Chazdon served as Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Biotropica, as President of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, and as a member-at-large of the governing board of the Ecological Society of America. She served on the Science Advisory Committee of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and the National Socio-environmental Synthesis Center. She has been a member of the Founding Board of the Costa Rica-USA Foundation for nine years and recently joined the Board of Directors of the EcoLogic Development Fund. She is the director of the recently funded Tropical Reforestation Research Coordination Network (PARTNERS). In January 2014 she will become the Executive Director of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. She is an author of over 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles and co-editor of two books. Her sole-authored book "Second growth: The promise of tropical forest regeneration in an age of deforestation" will be published by the University of Chicago Press in May 2014.