Restoration efforts will affect large areas of the planet and hundreds of millions of people over the coming decades, but what will these actions look like, and what will they achieve? Debate continues about what constitutes appropriate restoration targets in our human-dominated and ever more rapidly changing world, and the outcome of this debate will impact the actions taken to conserve biodiversity, sequester carbon, and improve human livelihoods at large spatial scales. This special issue brings together eight scientific, historical, and journalistic perspectives to address these two critical questions about ecological restoration in a rapidly changing biosphere.

We review some of the most commonly known models in restoration ecology from the past 20 years. From these, we seek to identify essential elements required for the scaling-up and mainstreaming of restoration and, based on that, develop a new framework that could be used to assist in the realization of long-lasting and effective restoration policies and programs at the landscape and larger spatial scales. We argue that the reference model is particularly important at a time when there are urgent calls and investments for scaling-up restoration to the landscape scale. At that scale, we argue, it is essential to consider both ecological restoration and ecological rehabilitation as just two of the various components in a “family” of restorative activities that must be deployed, including changed management practices for agriculture, to make ongoing human activities and land uses more ecologically sound and sustainable. In conclusion, we present a new model that could help orient if not actually design planning, monitoring and evaluation, scaling-up, and applying restorative activities in new areas.

The Earth system is undergoing rapid, profound anthropogenic change. The primary axes of change include not only the climate system, but also the spread of invasive species, altered biogeochemical and hydrological cycles, modified disturbance regimes, and land degradation and conversion. These factors are influencing the distribution of species and the structure and function of ecosystems worldwide, interacting with climatic stressors that may preclude the persistence of many current species distributions and communities. Ecological disturbances such as wildfires and insect outbreaks can interact with climate variability to precipitate abrupt change on landscape scales. Such changes may limit the feasibility of historically based ecological restoration in many (although by no means all) instances. An alternative emerging approach is based on reinforcing the ecological processes that comprise resilience: resistance, recovery, and reorganization. While resistance and recovery processes fall within a conventional restoration framework, managing populations and ecosystems for reorganization represents a departure from a reference-based restoration approach. When applied to ecosystem management, resilience-based management supplements traditional ecological restoration where stressors of change make the reestablishment of historical communities difficult or maladaptive. We illustrate these ideas with examples drawn primarily from the interior of western North America.

The practice of ecological restoration is challenged by accelerating rates and expanding scales of anthropogenic ecosystem change. The concept of “novel ecosystems” has become a focal point of intramural debate, leading restoration practitioners and researchers to reject, defend, revise, and reframe prior premises and goals. In a world of rapid environmental change, restoration can be seen, depending on one's perspective, as more necessary than ever, or as essentially futile. By revisiting restoration's history and defining a more nuanced approach to the realities of ecosystem change, we may be able to find space for reconciliation, or at least accommodation, of these divergent views. Aldo Leopold recognized as early as the 1930s that human impacts on the “biotic community” are pervasive; that “wilderness is a relative condition”; that conservationists must recognize “the dynamics of [the land's] past history and probable future.” At the same time, he pursued restoration as a necessary new dimension of conservation and proposed his “land ethic” as “a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate” that society had not yet evolved an effective ethical response. Since Leopold's generation, the “great acceleration” in global environmental change has altered the context in which we assess the promise and potential of restoration. It has only deepened, however, the need for conservation science, policy, ethics, and practice to engender resilient landscapes. Ecological restoration remains an essential means of doing so, albeit with redefined aims and methods.

Society has high expectations regarding the potential of ecological restoration to help confront the global environmental crisis, but the huge gap between restoration science and practice may undermine the recovery of native ecosystems in vast areas of degraded lands. In this paper, we explore the potential application of an innovation approach to bridge the gap between knowledge and action in restoration. The most promising innovation strategy for restoration is the adaptation of solutions developed in other fields of activity, for which market forces have historically supported programs of research and development. However, innovations in restoration may not rely only on technological tools requiring high investments. Rather, there are many opportunities for making better use of the existing funds and for low-cost solutions if restoration science and practice are reframed and integrated. If research projects are conceived to promote a co-production of knowledge with end users, valuable solutions for restoration problems may arise without extra investments. For restoration practice, substantial advances in our capacity to revert degradation could be obtained by shifting the focus from plot-scale, expensive solutions to the promotion of natural regeneration in sites where it is ecologically viable and socioeconomically feasible. For capacity building, promising approaches include emulating other models of technology transfer, mainly those used in agriculture, and fostering the use of web-based solutions. For governance, we recommend the promotion of “policy triggers” and better use of technology to obtain and integrate information. Finally, multi-stakeholder coalitions may contribute by linking these different fields of restoration and promoting the co-creation of solutions in complex socio-ecological systems. Large-scale restoration will not be achieved by the simple sum of small-scale projects implemented by traditional restoration approaches, so innovation can play an utmost role to fulfill the decades-old promise of restoration to reverse degradation at the landscape scale.

In the past few years, numerous global, national, and regional targets have been set to restore millions of hectares of tropical forest to achieve multiple goals, including carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, improvements in the quality and supply of water, and support of human livelihoods. To achieve these ambitious goals, restoration decision makers need guiding principles regarding how to invest limited resources for large-scale forest restoration. Research over the past two decades has shown that a host of abiotic and biotic factors can slow tropical forest recovery, but that the specific barriers to and rate of recovery are site specific. Hence, restoration strategies must be carefully selected considering the natural resilience of a given site, localized barriers to recovery, and the ecological and human goals of the project. Despite the substantial advances in our understanding of tropical forest regeneration and restoration, to date neither the scale of scientific studies nor the restoration projects being implemented have matched the ambitious forest landscape restoration plans that are being proposed. I discuss key ways to enhance the success of tropical forest restoration efforts, citing a range of examples to illustrate each point. Specifically, restoration projects need to be planned and evaluated at larger spatial scales and over longer time periods, which requires better integration of the science and practice of forest restoration. Ultimately, forest restoration success hinges on including multiple stakeholders, such as farmers, local communities, local government leaders, regional and national policymakers, and scientists, in the planning, implementation, and evaluation processes. Finally, efforts to improve knowledge sharing across restoration projects in different regions will enhance the likelihood of implementing successful tropical forest restoration projects at the desired scale.

Reversing large-scale degradation and deforestation goes beyond what can be achieved by site-level ecological restoration. Forest and landscape restoration focuses on spatial scales beyond the “site” level, where multiple land uses and forms of land ownership coexist, and where management decisions are usually made by different sets of stakeholders. In this context, natural regeneration can be a cost-effective approach to expand buffer zones of protected areas or forest reserves, create new forest patches and riparian zones, and create biological corridors to link existing protected areas. Here, I describe different modalities of natural regeneration, describe their benefits and features, and present several case studies of large-scale natural regeneration. Regrowing forests are often ignored, and their ecological and economic value remains largely unrecognized. Effective incentives for landowners and local communities are needed to encourage and protect naturally regenerating forests on farms. Predicting and mapping areas with a high capacity for natural regeneration will lower the overall costs of implementing restoration at local, regional, and national levels and may permit larger areas to be restored. Regrowing tropical forests will play an increasingly important role in climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation in our future uncertain world.

Why do some restored ecosystems persist for centuries while others are quickly converted to alternative land uses or land covers? We propose that restored ecosystems have a temporal dimension that is variable, often finite, and likely predictable to some extent based on attributes of stakeholders, environment, and governance. The longevity of a restored ecosystem carries strong implications for its capacity to support biodiversity and provide ecosystem services, so an emerging challenge for restoration ecology is to predict the circumstances under which restored ecosystems persist for longer or shorter periods of time. We use a case study in tropical forest restoration to demonstrate one way that restored ecosystem longevity can be approached quantitatively, and we highlight opportunities for future research using restoration case study repositories, practitioner surveys, and historical aerial imagery. Much remains to be learned, but it is likely that decision-makers and practitioners have considerable leverage to increase the probability that restored ecosystems persist into the future, extending the benefits of contemporary restoration initiatives.

The words we use to describe phenomena in science shape our understanding of those phenomena, much more so than we often realize. This is especially true in fields driven by strong policy agendas, like restoration ecology and the practice of ecological restoration. The twin challenges of accelerating global change and upscaling global restoration practice make it more imperative than ever to define the terms and the scope of ecological restoration clearly, and differentiate it from other ameliorative land management practices like rehabilitation. Poor definitions and loose use of language will otherwise lead to muddled conception and planning of projects, confused and disappointed stakeholders, and failure to exploit the enormous potential of this radical conservation strategy for both human well-being and the recovery of biodiversity and ecosystem functions. It is also important to be aware of the rhetorical devices that have given some momentum to the so-called “novel” ecosystems concept within the restoration community. The advocates of this concept initially used it to alert restorationists to the gravity of the global change challenge. But it has been unfortunately formulated through increasingly polemical language to effect a major and dangerous policy shift: abandoning the pursuit of the ambitious but still valid promise inherent in the phrase “ecological restoration,” in favor of the management of degraded landscapes for diminished ecosystem goods and services. While we are always “restoring the future,” there is no good reason to abandon the goal of restoring ecosystems to their historical trajectories, and the historical reference system remains an essential tool for the identification of the specifics of this goal. The author considers the contributions to the symposium from these perspectives. He concludes that if we clarify the language we use about restoration, and are appropriately mindful of the dynamics of global change and the complex social and ecological dynamics of large-scale restoration, this discipline and practice can indeed mature to become the gold standard and cutting edge for conservation in this century.

The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC), with its 16 plant conservation targets, was originally adopted by the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2002. It was updated and revised in 2010, with targets set to be achieved by 2020. The GSPC's targets are output oriented, specific, and measurable. They address the conservation needs of wild plants as well as those of cultivated crops, pastures, and forests. Although it is generally acknowledged that greater progress has been made in conserving threatened plants than would have been made without the GSPC, there is a continued lack of mainstreaming plant conservation at the national level and a lack of comprehensive information on which plants are threatened and where. With the GSPC reaching the end of its second phase in 2020, it is important to consider how plant conservation can enhance its visibility and generate support in the future. The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and associated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were developed to succeed the Millennium Development Goals and were adopted in 2015 by the international community through the United Nations. It is expected that the SDGs will shape the actions taken by governments in the future. This paper reviews and highlights the contribution that plant conservation can make in achieving the SDGs. The SDG framework provides a helpful point of reference to demonstrate the fundamental importance of plants for the planet, and importantly, if plant conservation is not achieved, then the achievement of these goals is put at risk, suggesting that the integration and mainstreaming of biodiversity conservation, ecological restoration of degraded ecosystems, and plant protection in particular, are of fundamental importance to the achievement of sustainability on the planet.

This case study describes the role of Chenshan Botanical Garden in the sustainable development of Shanghai City in the last six years and provides perspectives on future plant conservation and sustainable utilization. Sustainable economic growth is demanded by regions and countries with urbanization globally. Chenshan has played an important role in the sustainable development of Shanghai as a relatively newly established botanical garden. Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden works closely with the local government in the “City Green Master Plan” to increase plant diversity and join in rural park projects. It also provides technical support to city construction by introducing urban horticulture and phytoremediation. More than 20% of the plants in the most urbanized and industrialized areas in China are under threat. Chenshan has collaborated with the central government and the administration of local reserves in the conservation of 14 critically endangered plant species in East China. This has made the sustainable utilization of these plants possible. Chenshan also has a strategic vision to provide people with functional food. The secondary metabolism and gene-manipulating platforms have been already implemented to develop new varieties of plants to achieve this goal. As a botanical garden, Chenshan aims to attract and educate the public with landscapes, seasonal flower shows, and cultural events. Chenshan helps visitors understand the condition of plants and the ways to protect them. These are important tasks of botanical gardens in supporting sustainable urban development.

Rural communities in mountainous areas face distinct challenges in integrating traditional sustenance and emerging market uses of medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs). In Swat District, Pakistan, communities use MAPs for local medicinal purposes and for domestic food consumption. In addition, MAPs are traded in urban markets to generate income. This paper reports on a project aimed at capacity building through awareness raising, training, exposure, and developing market linkages to promote the sustainable use of MAPs. The project comprised a series of consultation and coordination meetings with the local Forest Department, focus group discussions in each village with MAP traders and collectors, and ethnobotanical field surveys guided by community members. The study reports twenty MAP species that had high market value and were used in indigenous medicine systems by all ethnic groups. These species were traded through formal and informal trade networks, including cross-border smuggling between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Additionally, the project included a range of interventions to foster sustainable use and livelihood improvements, such as local awareness campaigns, capacity-building training, community mobilization for conservation of threatened species, and exposure visits to link local communities to processors and buyers to maximize net income. Capacity building was the main intervention undertaken to achieve the overall objectives of the project. These ongoing interventions are successfully achieving all planned targets, and although it is too early to measure the impact of these activities, it is expected that the project will serve as a strategic investment for income generation through sustainable harvesting and marketing of MAPs for rural communities in remote northern parts of Swat District, Pakistan.

The rich flora of the Middle East is celebrated in the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens, where endangered species are propagated and protected. In this paper I share our primary projects and the organizations with which we work. Local and international collaborations are detailed and prominent plants are shown. My hope is that this information will promote understanding and collaborations to ensure plant conservation for future generations.

Australia's unique flora has evolved in isolation from many of the world's major plant pathogens. As these pathogens have made their way into Australia, their impact on plant species and communities has been dramatic. Two plant diseases, Phytophthora root rot and myrtle rust, are used as examples to illustrate the impact diseases can have on individual species, on plant communities, and on the species that depend on those plants. Botanic gardens have a key role to play in protecting plants and enhancing conservation outcomes through surveillance, education, and ex situ conservation programs.

Target 14 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation calls for an increase in the communication of the importance of plant diversity and conservation by education and public awareness programs. An unrelenting torrent of bad news about the environment and the loss of plant biodiversity, however, have led to despair among conservation practitioners and the public. Much of the damage to terrestrial habitats and the loss of plant biodiversity stem from problems that both biologists and the public can do something about. Indeed, the past decades have witnessed a growing number of successes in describing new species, saving species, protecting places, and restoring habitats. A number of plant species have come back from the brink of extinction and are being delisted. Priority areas for conservation are being identified and these areas are being established as protected nature reserves. Habitats once degraded by farming have been ecologically restored with native plant species. These and other examples underpin the Earth Optimism initiative that seeks to recognize, learn from, replicate, scale up, and celebrate our successes as a means to motivate further action.

There are an estimated 400,000 species of vascular plants on Earth, out of which 10% are still to be discovered. These plants, both known and unknown, may hold answers to many of the world's health, social, environmental, and economic problems. A full inventory of plant life is vital if many threatened species are to be protected and if their full potential is to be realized before many of these species, and the possibilities they offer, become extinct. In 2010, the updated Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) of the United Nation's Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) included as its first target (Target 1) the need for “an online flora of all known plants.” Bearing this in mind, in January 2012 in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., representatives from four institutions—the Missouri Botanical Garden, the New York Botanical Garden, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, all members of the Global Partnership for Plant Conservation—took the initiative to meet and discuss how to achieve GSPC Target 1 by 2020. The meeting resulted in a proposed outline of the scope and content of a World Flora Online (WFO), as well as a decision to create an international consortium of institutions and organizations to collaborate on providing its content. The WFO project was subsequently launched in October 2012 in India, at an event held during the 11th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD, where the COP also adopted a decision welcoming the WFO initiative. In January 2013, a memorandum of understanding on the WFO was open to signature. By the end of July 2016, 34 institutions and organizations had signed it. Other institutions and organizations worldwide are also invited to participate in the WFO Consortium. The WFO will be an open-access, web-based compendium of the world's plant species. It will be a collaborative, international project, building upon existing knowledge and published floras, checklists, and taxonomic and other revisions. It will also require the collection and generation of new information on poorly know plant groups and plants in unexplored regions. The project represents a major step forward in developing a consolidated global information service on the world's flora.

Brazil holds the largest flora in the world, with more than 35,000 described native species. However, a large portion of its flora is poorly known, and more than 2000 species are threatened with extinction. Because similar situations exist in virtually all other countries, the United Nations' Convention on Biological Diversity launched a program called the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC). The vision of GSPC is to halt the continuing loss of plant diversity through the achievement of 16 outcome-oriented global targets set for 2020. Here we discuss the challenges ahead for countries committed to achieving GSPC targets and use the experience of the National Centre for Flora Conservation (CNCFlora), in Brazil, as a case study of successes in pursuing some targets, and some perceived failures. We offer information that might help other countries, decision makers, and policymakers to address difficulties and move themselves toward achieving GSPC targets. We also synthesize the main targets upon which CNCFlora acts, their current situation, and the desired improvements necessary to achieve targets by 2020. Finally, we provide recommendations to actors, stakeholders, decision makers, and policymakers in Brazil that could foster conservation actions and strategies in the country.

In keeping with the 2011–2020 Strategic Plan adopted by the 10th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya, Japan, in October 2010, France scaled up its biodiversity action with a new National Biodiversity Strategy (NBS) for 2011–2020. Target 16 aims at strengthening international solidarity and ensuring greater mainstreaming of biodiversity into French development assistance, and target 17 addresses reinforcing green diplomacy and international governance for biodiversity. In this context, France launched in 2015 the Sud Expert Plantes Développement Durable (SEP2D) program, a five-year multilateral program aiming at sustaining the scientific communities in 22 francophone countries in western and central Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. Focusing on the sustainable management of plant biodiversity, SEP2D is supported by Agence Française de Développement (AFD), the French Global Environment Facility (GEF), and Ministère des Affaires étrangères et du Développement International (MAEDI), as well as other public and private partners among which are the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD). SEP2D is making every effort to bolster partnerships and collaboration on plant biodiversity, building bridges between research, education, and societal demands. In this regard it encourages the scientific community to work on applied topics, such as the major challenges associated with conservation and tropical plant biodiversity assessment. It advocates the national authorities, public stakeholders, private sector operators, and associations to meet societal demands by developing a culture of public-private partnership and backing vocational training for the green economy job market. The Program Steering Committee includes the institutional funders, southern representatives, and key partners. It relies on a Scientific and Pedagogical Council articulated around four themes: forestry and mines; the valorization of plants for medicinal, cosmetics, and agrobiodiversity purposes; research and collections; and training and awareness. The program and its context, planned actions for research, innovation, training, and transversal activities are presented in this paper.

Charles Darwin (1862, 1877) conducted field and lab research on orchid pollination mechanisms before any protocols or laws protected orchid species or individual populations. Information on the reproductive ecology of rare and threatened orchids remains intrinsic to their conservation as populations continue to diminish during the Anthropocene. We provide case studies of species representing five genera (Calanthe R. Br., Corunastylis Fitzg., Cypripedium L., Spiranthes Rich., and Thelymitra J. R. Forst. & G. Forst.) in three countries (the United States, Australia, and China). We compare differences in their pollination systems and seasonal variations in their fertility rates. Declining rates of fruit set and/or seed development are compared to breeding systems, pollinator life histories/foraging behaviors, and climate cycles. We conclude that, while some orchid species are pollinator limited, several interrelated factors influence rates of fecundity in terrestrial/lithophytic orchids.

The Indonesian Botanic Gardens–Indonesian Institute of Sciences (IBGs–LIPI) play a vital role in the world's plant conservation. By establishing 27 new botanic gardens throughout the Archipelago, in collaboration with local governments and universities, IBGs' collections conserve plant species from 16 out of 47 ecoregions occurring in Indonesia. IBGs are now accommodating 88,000 or more living specimens from 6000 flowering plant species and conserving at least 24% of the Indonesian native species listed in the global IUCN Red List. The establishment of new botanic gardens in Indonesia has been identified as one of the national priority programs, stated both in the Indonesian Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan and the Middle-term National Development Plan. By addressing the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) goals and targets by 2020, the IBGs have directly contributed to Targets 1 to 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, and 13 to 16 (Table 1), which are in line with the functions of botanic gardens stated not only in the Indonesian Presidential Decree No. 93 (2011) but also in the Aichi Biodiversity Target.

A global study has shown that Australian crop wild relatives (CWRs) are a priority for ex situ conservation and future use. The majority of target species occur across various land tenures in northern Australia, including Indigenous Protected Areas. Work undertaken on Indigenous lands needs careful consideration, and until recently the planning of wild crop collections has taken a Western scientific approach. Awareness of potential cultural issues associated with access and use of traditional knowledge is increasing, and Indigenous community expectations associated with use of their knowledge can vary between individual traditional owners and within communities. The Council of Heads of Australian Botanic Gardens Incorporated, through its Australian Seed Bank Partnership, is collaborating with the University of New England to define clear processes and develop protocols for traditional knowledge stewardship, helping to minimize the risk of compromising the cultural integrity of data, while being practical for implementation by the nation's leading botanic gardens. This paper examines how scientific paradigms within botanic garden policy are being transformed in the context of working with Indigenous traditional owners. It will highlight how the Partnership is creating possibilities “on country” (i.e., on traditional lands) within its projects and consider benefits that Indigenous communities may receive from working with this alliance.

Although both international conservation policymakers and conservation geneticists have the shared goal of halting the loss of biodiversity, currently these communities have very little interaction. Because the targets of international conservation policy focus very little on the conservation of genetic diversity in wild species, they have received little attention from the plant conservation genetics community. Conservation policymakers should more explicitly include the conservation of genetic diversity of wild species in future targets to ensure that this important aspect of biodiversity is not overlooked for the majority of species on earth and to attain more buy-in from the plant conservation genetics community; I highlight specific ways in which policymakers may more explicitly include genetic diversity in international policy targets. For their part, conservation geneticists need to conduct work that will advance the big-picture goals of conservation policy; here, I discuss specific actions that plant conservation geneticists can take, such as measuring the proportion of genetic diversity that is protected, designing experiments in such a way to measure genetic erosion, and developing protocols to increase the efficiency of ex situ collection efforts. By working together, plant conservation geneticists and conservation policymakers will more effectively accomplish the shared goal of halting the loss of plant biodiversity.