Shortlisted for the 2024 Southwood Prize
Natália Medeiros explains their latest research into tropical grassy biomes, which involved reviewing the association of restoration techniques and degradation sources, and investigating the diversity of indicators used to monitor restoration outcomes.
About the research
Overview
My shortlisted paper is about where and how ecological restoration of tropical open ecosystems occurs. We conducted a systematic review to map field studies done in tropical open ecosystems as an attempt to identify general patterns and to identify knowledge gaps. This, in turn, aims to provide broad guidance on future restoration policy and practice. We investigated the relationship between degradation sources and restoration techniques, and we also examined the diversity of indicators used to monitor restoration outcomes.
Challenges
One of our expectations was to advance our knowledge by identifying the more used (and maybe more suitable) restoration techniques to each specific degradation sources. However, we were not able to draw any synthetic conclusion based on previous restoration research due to the relative low amount of research data, their high context-dependency and poor data reporting.
To be honest, at first, I felt frustrated when I finished the systematic review process. I felt frustrated because after a lot of work, I could not draw any “practical” conclusion. However, when I discussed the results with my co-authors, I realized that despite not reaching my initial ambitious goals, I had found important knowledge gaps that needed to be addressed in future research, and I had to opportunity to better support data reporting in open ecosystem restoration research.
Next steps and broader implications
The next steps in this field are likely to increase restoration research to fill up knowledge gaps and improve data reporting. We need to scale up open ecosystem restoration from local study cases to large-scale endeavours. Hopefully, our guidelines will support such step. Increasing and improving research will allow a better understanding of the resilience and propagation of open ecosystem species as well as enabling quantitative synthesis to be done. I hope the next steps also include advances in the recognition of open ecosystems as valuable ecosystems that must be more appreciated as well as properly conserved and restored.
The broader impacts of my research for policy and practice are the multilingual guidelines for improving data reporting and the identification of knowledge gaps that must be addressed. We can advance a lot if we move restoration research forward using more transparent and more comprehensive data reporting. Standardizing terminology, methods and data reporting is the only way we can run meta-analyses to provide policy makers with solid field evidence to support public policy and general guidelines.
About the author
Current position
I am a PhD candidate in a dual degree Ecology program between Brazil (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais) and France (Avignon Université).
Getting involved in ecology
I started to work with ecology during undergraduation, when I had my first contact with scientific research. However, back then, I worked with population ecology of a Cerrado plant species (Matayba guianensis), exploring how the environment impacted its morphological traits. While I was still in undergraduation, I had the opportunity to attend to some courses and workshops about restoration, which, I think, sparked my interest to this field. Since my master I have been working with restoration and open ecosystems.
Current research focus
I decided to explore which plant species have been planted/seeded in restoration of open ecosystems. In fact, this work is already under review. We are also running a global meta-analyses to examine the impacts of tree planting in open ecosystems.
Moreover, I am concerned about the real impacts of my research, especially because many restoration practitioners may not read scientific papers. So, I am thinking about how I can reach restoration practitioners in Brazil, where we have been facing many threats to Cerrado (Brazilian savanna) and other open ecosystems like Campo rupestre. I thought about giving small workshops to broadcast the main founds of this research, highlighting the key issues in restoration of open ecosystems and strength the importance of data reporting.
Advice for fellow ecologists
I think one piece of advice I could give to anyone, especially for those who want to engage in the environmental field or restoration, is to never lose sight of what motivates you. Sometimes we can get frustrated by not reaching what we expected, sometimes our work may not be well appreciated, and we may need to work harder and harder… but I think that if we have good reasons to be motivated, we keep going.
Read the full article “Systematic review of field research reveals critical shortfalls for restoration of tropical grassy biomes” in Journal of Applied Ecology.
Find the other early career researchers and their articles that have been shortlisted for the 2024 Southwood Prize here!
