Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) Toolbox

Tool Details

The road to restoration: A guide to identifying priorities and indicators for restoration monitoring

Author Kathleen Buckingham; Sabin Ray; Carolina Gallo Granizo; Lucas Toh; Fred Stolle; Faustine Zoveda; Katie Reytar; Rene Zamora; Peter Ndunda; Florence Landsberg; Marcelo Matsumoto; John Brandt
Year of publication 2019
This guide walks practitioners through seven questions to help them make decisions regarding restoration monitoring. First, practitioners are asked to determine their restoration goals, land use and barriers to sustainability. These choices are filtered by constraints and priorities, so the practitioner will develop the indicators needed to setup their monitoring framework. It provides a framework for identifying indicators. Indicators are value laden measures of development performance designed to measure and calibrate progress. Environmental indicators are used to provide synthesized knowledge on environmental issues, and to highlight the extent of environmental trends. They also help to reduce complexity, provide important links between science and policy, and help decision-makers to provide guidance on environmental governance. An indicator framework can provide a management tool to help countries develop implementation strategies and allocate resources accordingly to reach restoration goals. Tracking progress with indicators can act as a report card to measure progress towards restoration and help ensure the accountability of all stakeholders for achieving the goals. The guide uses country case studies to show how a practitioner could answer the questions, offering a menu of potential indicators for measuring progress that other monitoring practitioners might find useful. Next, it highlights the different types of data that can feed into creating an indicator framework, depending on resource constraints and information needs. Some restoration programs may require fewer, cost-effective indicators that are collected locally. Other programs, may be able to integrate small, locally collected data with big data from satellite imagery and social media.
Type of Tool
Guidelines, manual, kits for trainers
Scale of Application
Forest Management Unit
Region
Global
Biome
All
Forest Type
All forest types (natural and planted)
Primary Designated Function
Multiple use
Management Responsibility
Government/State