Strategic approaches to restoring ecosystems can triple conservation gains and halve costs.

International commitments for ecosystem restoration add up to one-quarter of the world's arable land. Fulfilling them would ease global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity decline but could displace food production and impose financial costs on farmers. Here, we present a restoration prioritization approach capable of revealing these synergies and trade-offs, incorporating ecological and economic efficiencies of scale and modelling specific policy options. Using an actual large-scale restoration target of the Atlantic Forest hotspot, we show that our approach can deliver an eightfold increase in cost-effectiveness for biodiversity conservation compared with a baseline of non-systematic restoration. A compromise solution avoids 26% of the biome's current extinction debt of 2,864 plant and animal species (an increase of 257% compared with the baseline). Moreover, this solution sequesters 1 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent (a 105% increase) while reducing costs by US$28 billion (a 57% decrease). Seizing similar opportunities elsewhere would offer substantial contributions to some of the greatest challenges for humankind

Fire records in tree rings of Moquiniastrum polymorphum: potential for reconstructing fire history in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest

ABSTRACT Fire disturbance affects the composition, structure and dynamics of vegetation. Historical records of fire events exist in some places, but they are generally limited in temporal and spatial extent. Tree-ring research is a useful tool for fire history reconstruction and can contribute important long-term ecological data. We tested the hypotheses that Moquiniastrum polymorphum (Less.) G. Sancho, a widespread species in Brazil that occurs in burnt areas of Atlantic Forest, produces annual growth rings and that its wood can record fire incidence by datable fire scaring. Our results corroborate these hypotheses and indicate that the species has potential for fire history reconstruction

Author Correction: Strategic approaches to restoring ecosystems can triple conservation gains and halve costs (Nature Ecology & Evolution, (2019), 3, 1, (62-70), 10.1038/s41559-018-0743-8)

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper