Safeguarding biodiversity through interdisciplinary research on habitat restoration (SAFIRE)

To enable efficient habitat restoration, the program will fill crucial theory and knowledge gaps on environmental and socio-ecological systems processes and their interrelations. It will use novel tools, such as those described in SAF2, including citizen science. It will develop a holistic understanding for habitat restoration, including elucidating key animal-plant interactions for functional restoration of key species, investigating biotic and abiotic changes through space and time to identify major habitat degradation drivers, and understanding the impacts of social dynamics to ecosystems and their change.

SAFIRE will explore the potential of complex system science (CSS) approach for efficient habitat restoration. This will include using novel sensing technologies, such as remote sensing, environmental DNA/RNA, multi-isotopic tracers and low-cost sensors, to monitor biodiversity, greenhouse gas flux and habitat quality. It will also employ novel statistical and process-based modelling to track and simulate changes in ecosystem structure and functioning and improve the CSS approach. These methods will be deployed in collaboration with societal actors, for example through participatory monitoring in real-life communities and settings and through citizen science and bottom-up science methods. This may include integrating research and innovation in Living Labs and forming digital twins systems.

It is a serious problem that restoration projects usually fail to acknowledge the functional linkages between adjoining ecosystems, including their mediation through and impacts on human land use. For example, any efforts to restore riparian zones, forests or peatlands will have direct impacts on the adjacent freshwater habitats, and vice versa. SAF3 aims for a paradigm shift in uniting different fields of ecosystem restoration. It does so through research and stakeholder-engagement to overcome narrow-focused research and to enable effective stakeholder action.

We will address the disconnect between restoration research and action by using diverse modelling and simulation-based methods for knowledge co-production. Using models and simulation to co-design potential futures with stakeholders will illuminate societal consequences of current policy, financial, and business models, including risks and uncertainties, and produce new state-of-the-art approaches to actionable restoration knowledge.