Mise en place et évaluation d'un projet de restauration à grande échelle: exemple de la réhabilitation d'une steppe dans le Sud Est de la France

Abstract

International audienceRestoring ecosystems at large scale is challenging: the technics are mainly developed at small scales and the projects usually involve many stakeholders with different expectations. Our objective is to show how these constraints may be transformed into opportunities and how to assess the success of a whole large scale project. We used as an example the rehabilitation of a former intensive orchard to a Mediterranean steppe in the La Crau area (south-eastern France). Because the 357ha project involved several stakeholders, multiple objectives co-existed: creating biodiversity units for a mitigation bank, restoring traditional sheep grazing management, rehabilitating a suitable habitat for endangered steppe birds, and restoring the steppe plant community and the Coleoptera and Orthoptera community diversity, composition and structure. Several restoration methods were experimented at different scales and the overall project design was a trade-of between objectives, costs and opportunities. In order to have a global overview after 7 years, we will present the results within a new framework for ecological restoration project assessment. It has three hierarchical levels: 1-the project: it is composed with weighted objectives, the weight are given by stakeholders and a project score can be calculated for each stakeholder; 2-the objectives: they are composed with weighted variables; and 3-the variables which are standardized in order to be comparable to each other’s