Giving Compass' Take:

• Peter Rüegg discusses research that shows that after logging, human efforts to actively restore forests outperform natural forest recovery.

• What role can you. play in supporting active reforestation efforts? 

• Learn about tree-planting drones used to restore forests. 

Actively restored forests recover faster than areas left to regenerate naturally after logging, a new long-term study shows.

For the new study, researchers examined an area of tropical forest in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo that had suffered heavy logging in the 1980s but was subsequently protected from further deforestation or conversion to agricultural land.

The rainforests of Southeast Asia are among the fastest declining tropical ecosystems worldwide.

The researchers paid special attention to the forest’s capacity to rebuild biomass and found that areas left to regenerate naturally recovered by as much as 2.9 tonnes (about 3.1 tons) of aboveground carbon per hectare (about 2.47 acres) per year.

“This quantitatively confirms that if degraded forests get effective protection, they can recover well naturally,” says Christopher Philipson, senior scientist at ETH Zurich’s chair of ecosystem management and first author of the paper in Science.

More importantly, the research team found that areas of forest that underwent active restoration recovered 50% faster, from 2.9 to 4.4 tonnes (3.1 to 4.4 tons) of aboveground carbon per hectare per year.

Read the full article about helping forests recover from logging by Peter Rüegg at Futurity.