OCTF online seminar followed by Q&A – all welcome (NB – all times given in UK time)
The first part of the talk will focus on recent collaborative research to identify priority areas at national and international scales where restoration provides multiple benefits for climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and cost reduction. Models that predict spatial variation in natural regeneration potential and attributes provide important inputs for spatial planning of restoration initiatives at subnational scales. The second part will focus on the urgent need for an evidence-based approach to restoration. To develop this evidence base, interdisciplinary teams of scientists and implementers need to work together to synthesize information from successes and failures in restoration initiatives and policies to provide structured case studies, evidence-based guidelines, frameworks for action, and decision-support tools.
Robin Chazdon is Professor Emerita in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Connecticut and part-time Research Professor with the Tropical Forests and People Research Centre at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Her long-term and on-going collaborative research focuses on successional pathways, forest regeneration, ecosystem services provided by forests, and forest and landscape restoration. After 28 years as a university professor, Dr. Chazdon moved into the science-policy and science-practice arena in forest and landscape restoration. She is the principal consultant of Forestoration International LLC, a consulting group established to support implementation of forest and landscape restoration. From 2014-2019 she served as the Executive Director of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation and as Director of the NSF-funded Research Coordination Network PARTNERS (People and Reforestation in the Tropics). She is a Senior Fellow with the World Resources Institute Global Restoration Initiative; a Senior Research Associate with the International Institute for Sustainability in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She serves on many advisory councils including EcoLogic Development Fund, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bangalore, India, Nature-based Solutions Initiative in Oxford, UK, WeForest, and 1t.org. She has authored or co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters and co-edited two books on tropical forests. In 2018 she was selected as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics. Her sole-authored book “Second growth: The promise of tropical forest regeneration in an age of deforestation” was published in 2014.
