Restoration 
Plantations and tree crop commodities 
Enhanced nutrition and food security 
Biodiversity, safeguarding and conservation 
Nationally determined contributions 
Bioenergy and biomaterials 
Blue carbon and peatlands 
Climate change adaptation 
Landscape governance 
Gender 
Silvopastoral systems 
Market-based agroforestry-forestry 
Farm-forest policy interface 
Agroecology 
Livelihood trajectory modelling and assessment 
Inclusive finance and business models 
Innovating finance for sustainable landscapes 
Public and private commitments to zero deforestation 
Orphan tree crops 
Effectiveness of approaches to sustainable supply 
Quality of FTA research for development 
Sentinel landscapes 
Foresight 
Seeds and seedlings delivery systems 
Smallholder tree-crop commodities 
Forest restoration projects involving active planting should prioritize species that are useful to local communities, while also considering species' threat status and resistance to local stress factors, but scientific knowledge on these criteria is scarce, especially in understudied tropical ecosystems. We hypothesized that local ecological knowledge can help to fill this gap. Through interviews with 47 local experts and 197 randomly selected households in 8 rural communities of the tropical dry forests of northwestern Peru and southern Ecuador, we identified the species perceived as most useful, most threatened and most resistant to local stress factors. To better understand the studied local ecological knowledge, we also explored the following research questions and their implications for species selection decisions: (a) How does species' potential usefulness compare to their active use? (b) How does species' perceived threat status relate to their usefulness? (c) Does local knowledge on species' resistance to local stress factors corroborate scientific knowledge? We found large differences between the potential and active use of species and illustrate how data on both can yield useful insights. Further, we found that species' perceived threat status was mainly linked to their usefulness for construction wood, and that the vast majority of local perceptions on species' threat status and stress resistance coincided with scientific knowledge. Our findings illustrate the large potential of local ecological knowledge for improving species selection strategies and thereby increasing the success of forest restoration efforts worldwide.
Authors:
Fremout, T.; Gutierrez-Miranda, C.E.; Briers, S.; Marcelo-Peña, J.L.; Cueva-Ortiz, E.; Linares-Palomino, R.; La Torre-Cuadros, M. de los Á.; Chang-Ruíz, J.C.; Villegas-Gómez, T.; Libertad Acosta-Flota, A.H.; Plouvier, D.; Atkinson, R.; Charcape-Ravelo, M.; Aguirre-Mendoza, Z.; Muys, B.; Thomas, E.
Subjects:
tropical forests, ecological restoration, ecosystem services
Publication type:
ISI, Journal Article, Publication
Year:
2021
ISSN:
1526-100X
