World Environment Day (WED) is an annual event that is aimed at being the biggest and most widely celebrated global day for positive environmental action. World Environment Day celebrations began in 1972 and has grown to become the one of the main vehicles through which the UN stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and encourages political attention and action.
This year’s theme ‘Forests: Nature at Your Service’ emphasises the essential link between quality of life and the health of forests and forest ecosystems. The theme also supports this year’s UN International Year of Forests.
A Linkage grant has just been awarded to Environment Institute Researchers, Professor Andrew Lowe, Professor Barry Brook and Professor Corey Bradshawto develop best-practice restoration guidelines for forest ecosystems to enable them to become resilient to climate change and maximise biodiversity and carbon capture outcomes. The grant titled ‘Developing best-practice approaches for restoring forest ecosystems that are resilient to climate change’ is for $405,222.00 over four years.
Habitat restoration is critical for ameliorating the ecological impacts of environmental change. However, existing restoration practices tend to rely on ad hoc rules of thumb (e.g. ‘local is best’) that lack a firm scientific basis, fail to account for future climates, risk wasting resources and will likely produce sub-optimal, long-term outcomes. The project proposes to improve current restoration practices by combining genetic diversity, fitness assessment and simulation modeling with large-scale planting experiments to develop best-practice approaches for species and provenance choice, and landscape designs that are resilient to climate futures. It will also assess planting outcomes in terms of market-based instruments for biodiversity and carbon.
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