Forest conservation entails both halting destruction and protecting the state of the forest's vegetation. Monitoring forest cover and restoring degraded forests are critical ecological aspects for India's forestry sector's long‐term growth. Cropland expansion and intensification are the primary approaches for increasing agricultural productivity in response to increased biomass demand, but they are also major drivers of biodiversity loss. We evaluated the ecosystem carbon (C) stock and sequestration potential for dry deciduous forests while assessing the drivers of forest degradation in Central India to advance scientific knowledge and minimize the anthropogenic C emissions from prevalent agriculture intensification in the region. A multi‐criteria optimization approach was used to identify the priority areas forrestoration and quantify the magnitude of drivers of biodiversity loss in the region by investigating the links between forest carbon stock, agriculture intensification, and altering forest structure at various degrees of forest disturbance. The total existing carbon stock of trees in study area during March 2020, was 199.12 Mg C ha−1. Overall carbon stock of these forests showed a significant correlation with disturbance levels (r = 0.50). Changes in vegetation especially to intensive agriculture practices have resulted in loss of carbon stocks and will cause large‐scale forest decline if not addressed immediately. Considering the rapid loss of forests in situation where India has to fulfill Nationally Determined Contributions to UNFCCC, Forest Landscape Restoration becomes priority and needs specialized efforts with enhanced funding to reduce and halt loss of forests.
Sustainable land restoration has made remarkable progress over the past decade in terms of inclusivity, integration, and sustainability. Big data analytics has gained momentum in the Global North with large repositories being developed to analyze, monitor, and track the health and status of ecosystems after active restoration. However, restoration initiatives in Global South still face issues of fragmented implementation, uneven success ratios, and also run the risk of not being built upon in the future. Copious data going unregistered causes discrepancies in reporting the failure or progress made toward global commitments. Active involvement of indigenous and local communities, followed by citizen scientists' cooperation can help mainstream big data analytics to revolutionize sustainable land restoration. Financial support from private sector toward advanced technologies for processing and providing access to ecological big data of restoration, carrying out capacity building initiatives under long‐term restoration research can be a game changer.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.