RESTORE

• RESTORE represents the first project studying long-term interrelationships between ecosystem components under different disturbance regimes and management scenarios focusing on limiting factors for biodiversity, ecosystem resilience, resistance and services.

• Forest classification in both countries, Finland and Russia, is based on understorey vegetation. However, comparative analysis of vegetation succession after natural disturbances and management treatments has not been done yet. RESTORE offers a unique possibility to describe successional stages based on data from pristine and managed forests.

• The method of complex assessment of ecosystem stability as resilience, resistance and elasticity, as well as theoretically predicted steady state, based on dynamics of ecosystem characteristics reconstructed from permanent plot records is new. RESTORE will first apply resilience and resistance thresholds to develop management and restoration tools in boreal regions.

• Forest management and restoration studies in Finland have not been synthesized and turned into practical guidance. RESTORE will first time develop management and restoration tools to restore biodiversity, resilience, resistance and ecosystem services based on empirical data, modeling and feedback from stakeholders.

The RESTORE will estimate

• breakdown of the resilience, i.e. is the probability of catastrophe higher in 'poor' ecosystems as compared to 'rich' ones, or, in another words, do the ecosystems with higher diversity better recover after disturbance being more resilient?

• ecosystem resistance, i.e. how ecosystems act under disturbances, can biodiversity increase the threshold of the disturbance intensity before abrupt change in ecosystem's functioning?

• ecosystem elasticity, i.e. do ecosystems with higher diversity recover faster?

This all is closely related to ecosystem services: the longer ecosystem persists despite disturbances, the better and faster it recovers after disturbance the better quality are ecosystem services.

The RESTORE uses the information from MONTA, RETREE and EVO - some of the longest management and restoration experiments in Fennoscandia, which allow tracking forest ecosystem dynamics after treatments in comparison with pristine conditions.

The management and restoration tools will represent combination of the following treatments, characteristics of which (e.g. the optimal number, spatial distribution and shape of retention tree groups, number of trees by tree species etc.) will be defined according to resilience, resistance and elasticity threshold of each ecosystem type.
1. Low-level retention felling as an alternative to clear felling.
2. Gap felling as an alternative to clear felling, or as a restoration tool, increasing stability of over-mature stands.
3. Selection felling as an alternative to clear felling.
4. Prescribed burning as i) management tool stimulating natural regeneration, ii) restoration tool restoring biodiversity in relevant ecosystem types.
5. Creating snags and high stumps in relevant ecosystem types.
6. Long-term landscape-level ecological planning based on GIS including strictly protected areas such as reserves and key habitats; partly protected areas such as buffer zones and ecological corridors and successional chronosequence of intensively managed areas.

The costs of treatments and time needed for recovery of the main ecosystem characteristics will be calculated.

To understand the human footprint on forests one can use pristine forests as references.

In the European part of Russia only 9 % of forests are in pristine conditions, but these forests represent the last big forest wilderness areas in Europe and they are an important part of the common European heritage.

Most of the information of the pristine forests in Russia is available only in Russian and not synthesized with the information on the intensively managed forests in Europe.

RESTORE characterizes patterns in pristine European boreal forests using literature review and unique dataset as well as modelling 'steady state' and probability of the resilience breakdown for different ecosystem types. We evaluate the restoration success by comparing the dynamics of ecosystem components after different management and restoration treatments.

Forest management and restoration studies in Finland have not been synthesized and turned into practical guidance so far. RESTORE will combine the unique research material collected from pristine forests in Russia , with intensively managed forests in Finland. Based on this study RESTORE will develop new planning tools for a broad scale of end-users.

The relevancy of suggested management and restoration tools is ensured by the feedback from the RESTORE Advisory board, consisting of members from JRC, FAO, Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and other forest management and conservation organizations.