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Improve forest restoration initiatives to meet Sustainable Development Goal 15

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 5, pages 10–13 (2021)Cite this article

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Monoculture plantations have been promoted for the restoration of the world’s forested area, but these have not contained or reversed the loss of biodiversity. More innovative incentive policies should be implemented to shift the planet’s forest restoration policies from increasing the area of forests per se to improving their biodiversity.

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Fig. 1: Changing characteristics of the world’s forests and biodiversity.
Fig. 2: Two contrasting perspectives of the same monoculture plantation of Masson pine (Pinus massoniana) in the red soil area of southern China.

Junze Zhang (a and b).

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 41991230), the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (grant no. 2019QZKK0405) and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant no. 2017YFA0604701).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Junze Zhang, Bojie Fu, Shuai Wang & Wenwu Zhao

  2. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Bojie Fu

  3. CSIRO Land and Water, Black Mountain, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

    Mark Stafford-Smith

Authors
  1. Junze Zhang
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  2. Bojie Fu
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  3. Mark Stafford-Smith
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  4. Shuai Wang
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  5. Wenwu Zhao
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Contributions

B.F. designed the main perspective of the Comment. M.S.-S., S.W. and W.Z. provided recommendations regarding the forest restoration initiatives. J.Z. drafted the manuscript. All authors reviewed the manuscript and approved it for submission.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bojie Fu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Table 1 and references.

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Zhang, J., Fu, B., Stafford-Smith, M. et al. Improve forest restoration initiatives to meet Sustainable Development Goal 15. Nat Ecol Evol 5, 10–13 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01332-9

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