FRONT Associate Professor Aleksi Räsänen and working group was granted €279,700 from KONE foundation

Aleksi Räsänen and his research group got the KONE grant for their mires restoration research project.

“This was great news. The grant enables two doctoral researchers to work for four years. The funding decision was a positive surprise, even though we knew we worked hard on the application”, says Räsänen, Tenure Track Associate Professor of Spatial Resilience Research Methods (Geography) in FRONT research programme at the University of Oulu.

The research project aims to improve the ecological state of mires through restoration

The ecological state of mires can be improved through restoration. For restoration planning, it is necessary to know which factors affect the success of restoration. To meet this need, an interdisciplinary project utilizes a massive and globally unique dataset collected by restoration experts, which has not been previously used in scientific research, as well as spatial and remote sensing data, surveys, and workshops.

The project addresses the following questions: (1) What factors affect the success of mire restoration according to restoration experts, (2) Can differences between successful and unsuccessful restoration sites be detected using satellite remote sensing data, (3) What landscape-level factors (e.g., topography, climate, land use) affect the success of restoration, and (4) What indicators can be used to monitor the ecological success of mire restoration3?

The management monitoring data is analyzed using content analysis and supervised machine learning methods. In remote sensing analysis, satellite image-based methods are developed to identify changes after restoration and assess the extent of impacts. Spatial modeling is used to study which landscape and environmental factors affect the success of restoration.

Indicators describing the ecological state of restored mires are co-developed with restoration experts through surveys and workshops. The project enables scientific breakthroughs, as no equally extensive research on factors affecting the success of restoration has been conducted in mire ecosystems before. Similarly, remote sensing research helps scale the monitoring of the state of mires and ecosystems to larger areas. The results of the project can be used in the planning of mire restoration and the development of monitoring methods.

Congratulations on the grant!