Regreening Africa with natural regeneration

The challenge

With 65% of agricultural land in Africa degraded, the need to effectively scale up restoration is evident. Natural regeneration (NR) is a promising restoration solution that depends on vegetation regrowing from seed or tree stumps, without the need to plant trees. However, we do not know what regenerates where and what benefits it may bring.

What we do know comes from ecological studies on secondary succession that exclude human influences. This informs restoration poorly since people continuously use, manage, and control NR.

Aims

This study aims to:

1. Evaluate how NR develops over time and what benefits it brings.
2. Explore the optimal social-ecological conditions for NR-based restoration.
3. Predict the current and future NR restoration potential across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Approach

Recent scientific breakthroughs in succession ecology and on-the-ground restoration developments offer exciting opportunities to gain new mechanistic insights into NR dynamics. I will:

1. Monitor woody vegetation in 150 unmanaged and managed agricultural fields across three ecoclimatic zones in Kenya.
2. Measure plot-level environmental and social variables that affect species performance.
3. Employ a trait-based approach to evaluate the relative importance of different regeneration mechanisms and consequences for multiple ecosystem functions.
4. Scale up mechanistic insights using large datasets and identify regional drivers of NR abundance, functional composition, and diversity.
5. Predict climate change effects on NR and map current and future NR restoration potential across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Impact

I will develop a mechanistic social-ecological framework for NR by integrating social dimensions into ecological theory, which allows us to predict how NR contributes to restoration and where it may need to be complemented with tree planting. This is vital for effectively scaling up restoration during the current UN decade on ecosystem restoration.