Sharing knowledge to improve ecological restoration outcomes

Beyond despair: Leveraging ecosystem restoration for psychosocial resilience

Ecosystem restoration has historically been viewed as an ecological endeavor, but restoration possesses significant, yet largely untapped, potential as a catalyst for personal and social transformation. We highlight the opportunity for restoration to enhance community resilience by increasing agency and collective action and countering the pervasive perception that we are powerless witnesses to environmental decline. In this perspective, we take a "bright spots" approach and highlight successful examples of ecosystem restoration that have helped to nurture a sense of place, foster optimism, and cultivate stronger and more diverse social networks. These three individual- and community-level capacities have the potential to lead to increased psychosocial resilience, which is a key component of community resilience. Our aim is to spark discussion and research to better understand how we can transform restoration from a largely technical endeavor to a practice and process through which human-nature relationships are infused with deliberate meaning and human well-being is improved. With current calls to upscale and technologize restoration to meet sustainable development goals, we cannot lose sight of the value of community-engaged ecosystem restoration as a strategy with great potential for psychosocial benefits.

Forest Restoration and the Zoonotic Vector Anopheles balabacensis in Sabah, Malaysia

Anthropogenic changes to forest cover have been linked to an increase in zoonotic diseases. In many areas, natural forests are being replaced with monoculture plantations, such as oil palm, which reduce biodiversity and create a mosaic of landscapes with increased forest edge habitat and an altered micro-climate. These altered conditions may be facilitating the spread of the zoonotic malaria parasite Plasmodium knowlesi in Sabah, on the island of Borneo, through changes to mosquito vector habitat. We conducted a study on mosquito abundance and diversity in four different land uses comprising restored native forest, degraded native forest, an oil palm estate and a eucalyptus plantation, these land uses varying in their vegetation types and structure. The main mosquito vector, Anopheles balabacensis, has adapted its habitat preference from closed canopy rainforest to more open logged forest and plantations. The eucalyptus plantations (Eucalyptus pellita) assessed in this study contained significantly higher abundance of many mosquito species compared with the other land uses, whereas the restored dipterocarp forest had a low abundance of all mosquitos, in particular, An. balabacensis. No P. knowlesi was detected by PCR assay in any of the vectors collected during the study; however, P. inui, P. fieldi and P. vivax were detected in An. balabacensis. These findings indicate that restoring degraded natural forests with native species to closed canopy conditions reduces abundance of this zoonotic malarial mosquito vector and therefore should be incorporated into future restoration research and potentially contribute to the control strategies against simian malaria.