FOREST RESTORATION: FROM THE DIAGNOSTIC OF DEGRADATION TO THE SELECTION OF ECOLOGICAL INDICATORS TO THE MONITORING OF ACTIVITIES.

Abstract

Planning ecological restoration activities requires, first of all, a diagnostic study should address the site degradation, in order to establish the goals of the restoration project (e.g., ecosystem structure or function recovery, ecological process reestablishment). Both goals and temporal scale proposed may indicate if a project designed to recover a degraded forest site should be considered a recovery, a rehabilitation or a restoration project. Approaches may be the same for the three concepts, and one should not prevail over the two others, despite ecological restoration demands information on the ecosystem dynamics. The selection of environmental parameters as indicators of ecological restoration success should be done during the planning of activities. Choosing the most adequate restoration practices also requires information on the past land use history, which suggests distinct approaches to both distinct sites and situations. This review proposes to focus concepts and approaches which may support diagnostic studies on degraded forests, as well as the selection of the most adequate strategies for their restoration.