Restoration of temperate forests in the Southern Cone of South America: Approaches and Challenges

Abstract
According to the 2020 updated Chilean NDCs under the Paris Climate Accord, Chile is committed to having 1 million hectares of landscapes under restoration by 2030, with at least 70.000 ha of planted native forests. However, at current rates of restoration this commitment will be hard to meet. Previous studies suggest four bottlenecks that currently prevent restoration from being feasible on a large scale in Chile. These bottlenecks range from the lack of a national restoration strategy, the lack of stock of native plants in nurseries and of seeds to produce them, and poor results in the seed-establishment phase. In recent years, a lot of work has been done to try to solve these bottlenecks, but only partial success has been achieved. Nowadays, in the Chilean temperate bioclimatic region, the place with greatest potential for ecological restoration in the country, there are only ca. 100 restoration initiatives, most of which use artificial regeneration, are relatively small and are only with evaluated in terms of survival and early growth (les than 5 years since plant establishment). In this webinar, we discuss the main challenges for the restoration of Chilean temperate forest ecosystems and how to improve the restoration scenario by 2030. We emphasize the need to promote natural regeneration approaches, and evaluate restoration success by assessing structural, compositional and functional aspects of ecosystem integrity in restored areas. Applied research on these topics will give guidance to restoration practitioners as to how to restore degraded forests and how to evaluate restoration success. Also it will allow us to know if during the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration we are only summing area with established trees or if we are really restoring functional forests for future decades.
Bio Sketch
Dr. Jan Bannister is a Chilean Forest Engineer from Universidad Austral de Chile with a Ph.D from the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources of the University of Freiburg, Germany. I am currently a Principal Researcher at the Chilean Forestry Institute (Instituto Forestal, INFOR), where he works in the Forest Ecosystem Restoration Research Program. In addition, Jan is a visiting professor in the Master's and Doctorate in Sciences Program at the University of Los Lagos, Chile, and advisor to various environmental projects and initiatives. For more than 20 years, he has been conducting research on the ecology, stand dynamics and ecological restoration of Patagonian native forests in Chile, especially in the Chiloé Archipelago. As a result of this research, Jan has authored or co-authored over 40 publications (journals, books, and chapters) and has been in charge of 7 research projects. Due to his scientific and recreational expeditions in Patagonia, Jan has a thorough knowledge of the geography and environmental problems of this area, especially in the insular zone. Jan believes that applied environmental research is a fundamental pillar for the integral economic, social and environmental development of the southern zone of Chile. In this context, he is now leading a research group that is focused on integrating the study of structural, compositional and functional aspects of ecosystem integrity, with the overall objective of evaluating how different restoration approaches promote restoration success after stand-replacing anthropogenic fires, along the temperate bioclimatic region.