Agro-Successional Restoration as a Strategy to Facilitate Tropical Forest Recovery

Background

Abandoned agricultural lands have been increasingly around the world, forcing a recent drive to restore and reforest these lands. Yet, in the tropics there is often limited funding to meet the needs of restoration and the activities conflict with the uses of natural resources that contribute to human livelihoods. This paper outlines agro-successional restoration as a solution to these issues.  

Goals & Methods

The goal of the paper is to promote agro-successional restoration and highlight the potential of the approach to be used more widely to expand forest restoration efforts temporally and spatially. The authors begin describing more traditional approaches to restoration, including the forest restoration model and the agroforestry model, and then move on to describing the agro-successional model along with its benefits and drawbacks. 

Conclusions & Takeaways

The authors ultimately propose the agro-successional restoration model as a cost effective effort that not only provides ecological and biodiversity services, but also contributes to the livelihoods and needs of the local communities. Through “agro-successional restoration” results that mirror natural succession can be met with systems that provide for human livelihoods in a cost effective manner.