Articles on restoration and rewilding

Rewilding
#1

Outlook magazine has some recent articles on ecological restoration and rewilding:

From Seed To Forest: The slow road of ecological restoration
By Ananda Banerjee

India’s Revenant Forests
The country’s programme for restoration of lost green cover makes no sense. Neither on paper nor on the ground.
By T. R. Shankar Raman

Weed out the Brutish Colonisers
By Ramesh Venkataraman
Check the magazine for the link

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#2

A critical view on the Miyawaki approach to urban greening/tree planting by Dr RJ Ranjit Daniels and Ms Anjana Vencatesan (Care Earth, Chennai). Worth a read!

Why the Miyawaki Method Is Not a Suitable Way to Afforest Chennai

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#3

An article of mine appeared in The Hindu Sunday Magazine today. It stems from work and ideas that Divya Mudappa, I and our team at NCF have been grappling with for many years. Do read. Comments welcome.

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#4

This was very well articulated - thanks!

Follow up questoin/debate around 1 few points :

  • We need many to restore, given the scale and rapidity of destruction. Else we’ll have massive net loss on a continued basis. How does one make the “right planting knowledge” available easily for various bio-regions?
  • Agroforestry will necessarily include fruit trees that are non native. Diverse planting may be worse than purely endemic, naturally grown forests but are better than monocultures and constant desertification approaches to agriculture. A very hard stance as a purist may scare people off planting altogether?
  • Forests themselves change over time. Natural succession happens as well and various ecosystems are sometimes interim stages. How does one figure out a natural grassland from one that is at a certain stage because the place got chopped down and desertified and pioneers/grasses have started to kick of succession again?

I think a session on some of these, and maybe a platform to share data widely may help. cc @akshay @karanthkk @erbdex @artid @Kapil.097 what say?

#5

Hi,

Thanks for the comments. We are presently engaged in an effort to answer the question regarding the right planting knowledge. It is nascent and I will share details about it if it bears some fruit and at an appropriate time later…

I do not want to take a very hard or purist stance, except for some areas that have high conservation value. There is still large areas, incl. human-use landscapes for a lot of middle ground. The main point is to widen the net of species to more natives as far as possible, rather than more easy/familiar non-natives.

Your third question has to be answered in context of specific areas/landscapes. But this paper might give some ideas of what would be the reasoning or approach:
When is a ‘forest’ a savanna, and whydoes it matter? https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00634.x

See also:
Trees as Nature-Based Solutions: A Global South Perspective
Trees as Nature-Based Solutions: A Global South Perspective - ScienceDirect

Thanks,
~S

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