Restoring Biodiversity in Deforested Ranches One Tree at a Time

For decades, there has been a debate raging in conservation science: what is better when it comes to conservation or landscape rehabilitation: a single large or several small habitat areas?

Looking at a deforested area in the Amazon, a multidisciplinary team of researchers showed that small, careful interventions can have an impact. The paper "One Tree at a Time: Restoring Landscape Connectivity through Silvopastoral Systems in Transformed Amazon Landscapes" is published in the journal Diversity.

Connect with farmers to reconnect fragmented ecosystems

The study looked an area of the Colombian Amazon that was deforested over 50 years ago. Karolina Argote, lead author of the paper; a doctoral student at Mediterranean Institute of Marine and Terrestrial Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE) in Marseille, France, who was also an associated researcher at the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT at the time of the study, explains that at first, it was thought that these areas would not even merit resources to restore.

But working closely with farmers at cattle grazing areas in Caqueta, Colombia, Argote and her colleagues were able to co-develop plans on how to connect remaining fragmented vegetation like riparian galleries and the relics of native forest, producing benefits for both farmers and biodiversity.

"We know it's not possible to restore these fragmented ecosystems overnight; restoration implies not only time and funding, but also a strong commitment from ranchers to restore these ecosystems. What was lacking was technical and scientific evidence that shows that making these small interventions at the farm level does have an impact at the landscape level in terms of connectivity of the animal and plant populations of the ecoregion," Argote said. "This was an academic paper that showed, with statistics, that small interventions really do serve to increase connectivity, but if you don't plan and you don't know the farm, it's going to be hard to implement this."