Researcher Wang Kelin's team from the Huajiang Karst Ecosystem Observation Research Station of the Subtropical Agriculture and Ecology Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has put forward a social-ecological research framework for enhancing the sustainability of ecological restoration in karst areas, building upon the achievements in combating rocky desertification in southwest China's karst region and the new challenges it faces. The findings were published on May 14 in Earth’s Future.
The team's research reveals significant achievements in combating rocky desertification in southwest China's karst region under the backdrop of large-scale ecological protection and restoration. From a natural perspective, the area of rocky desertification in the southwest karst region has continuously decreased, making it a global "greening" hotspot in the past two decades. The ecological restoration contributes significantly to carbon sequestration, but differences in rock-soil composition affect the types and quality of vegetation restoration. In particular, soil fertility and mineral nutrient constraints in the soil-vegetation system hinder the restoration of forest landscapes in some karst areas.
The geological background constrains the ecological restoration in karst areas, facing new issues and challenges such as the selection of suitable afforestation sites under different geological environments, enhancing the productivity of artificial forests, improving ecosystem services, balancing regional "greening," and economic benefits. In response, Researcher Yueyue Min from the team of Wang Kelin proposed a social-ecological research framework to enhance the sustainability of afforestation in karst areas.
Common social-ecological system frameworks often overlook the influence of historical changes. This framework integrates long-term human disturbances and forest evolution, defining the socio-ecological feedback processes over a continuous time scale. It clarifies key periods of human disturbance and forest evolution in the southwestern karst region of China, including the period of human disturbance initiation (1400-1920 AD), the period of intense human disturbance (1920-2000 AD), the contemporary conservation and restoration period (since 2000), and the future ecological spatial optimization period (until 2100). It reconstructs the forest pattern evolution of "natural forest-deforestation-reforestation" under human disturbance in the southwestern karst region since the Ming and Qing dynasties.
This framework provides an important scientific basis for the precise implementation of ecological construction space optimization and ecological restoration in the southwestern karst region, offering robust evidence to assess the extent of regional forest recovery and the genuine need for afforestation measures.
The research was supported by the National Key R&D Program, the National Natural Science Foundation Key Fund, and leading talents in science and technology innovation in Hunan Province.
For more information, please refer to the related paper: https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EF004335
