The Unknown Trajectory of Forest Restoration: A Call for Ecosystem Monitoring

摘要

Restoration of forest ecosystems is a common objective of land managen throughout the western United States. Unfortunately, limited federal funding and a lack of specific enforcement of existing regulations has resulted in a lack of effectiveness monitoring (monitoring that provides information on the successes and impacts of the activity or project) after forest restoration activities on federal lands, thus inhibiting learning about, and improving the success of, restoration efforts. Monitoring could potentially be conducted on limited federal budgets through use of (1) multiparty teams composed of volunteers on a portion of restoration sites, (2) a statistical sampling strategy on a limited set of sites for intensive monitoring by federal monitoring teams, and (3) remote sensing to monitor a select set of variables across a broad portion of the affected landscape. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]