The present and future of grassland restoration

Abstract

Grasslands contribute greatly to biodiversity and human livelihoods; they support 70% of the world's agricultural area, but are heavily degraded by human land use. Grassland restoration research and management receives less attention than forests or freshwater habitats, although grasslands are critical for sustaining ecosystems multifunctionality and capacity to support biodiversity. In this article, we introduce a Special Issue which considers major trends and prospects in grassland restoration. We identified three key topics: First, restoration must confront widespread seed and site limitations, and new monitoring methods, including remote sensing techniques, are critical for restoration projects. Second, we highlight that restored grasslands typically require ongoing disturbance management and that research is required to determine optimal approaches for implementing this management during restoration. Third, global and regional restoration agendas should be harmonized with site‐level goals, and syntheses of current knowledge and research needs must guide grassland restoration across scales. We also identify research gaps to be filled, and challenges which grasslands face in the future: (1) a need for careful target vegetation selection and climate‐adaptive restoration; (2) lack of knowledge in dynamics and restoration of several regions and grassland types, including drylands and (sub)tropical regions; (3) increased importance of species arrival sequence, and high stochasticity of species establishment; and finally (4) issues of post‐restoration management to guarantee long‐term sustainability of restored sites. A new generation of research and restoration projects to bridge these gaps is necessary to mitigate environmental challenges spanning localities to the globe as we commence the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

Urgent need for updating the slogan of global climate actions from “tree planting” to “restore native vegetation”

“…However, grasslands may sometimes represent larger and more stable carbon sinks belowground than forests below-and aboveground combined (Dass et al 2018). The attention of the scientific community is also biased for forests, as a recent synthesis highlighted that nearly three times more papers are available in the Web of Science portal on the restoration of forests than grasslands (Török et al 2021). This bias is particularly expressed in the Global South, where grassland restoration is still in its infancy (Buisson et al 2021).…”

Stages of grassland degradation in subalpine ecosystems of the Central Caucasus, Russia

“…Muller et al (2021) revealed the significantly less diversity and evenness in transformed grasslands since some species became more dominant. Meanwhile, Török et al (2021) concluded that disturbances promote species diversity by reducing the biomass of dominant grasses.…”

Restoration of ecologically valuable grassland on sites degraded by invasive Solidago: lessons from a 6‐year experiment

“…Nonetheless, many semi‐natural grasslands have been converted into arable fields, overused, or simply abandoned (McDonald et al, 2016), making them the most threatened terrestrial habitats in Europe (Janssen et al, 2016) and worldwide (Humphries et al, 2021). This situation warrants immediate action to restore their beneficial services (Humphries et al, 2021; Janssen et al, 2016; Sojneková & Chytrý, 2015; Török et al, 2021).…”