Stephanie Mansourian

This collection features four peer-reviewed reviews on restoring degraded forests. The first chapter reviews the restoration of tropical forests, focusing specifically on forest landscape restoration (FLR). It addresses the importance of implementing FLR and provides two detailed case studies to demonstrate this. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the challenges and opportunities in taking FLR forwards. The second chapter considers the importance of exploiting the genetics of tropical tree species for the restoration of tropical forests. The chapter identifies and reviews the available methods to measure genetic diversity and suitability for future plantation establishment, including field trials and molecular markers. The third chapter provides an overview of ecosystem services delivered by tropical agroforestry systems (AFS). The chapter reviews practical approaches for trade-off analysis between ecosystem services and plant biodiversity for better design (or redesign), as well as the sustainable management of AFS. The final chapter discusses how measuring, monitoring and managing the environmental impact of plantation operations are key components in sustainable palm oil production. The chapter examines the operational impacts of oil palm cultivation on biodiversity, as well as how oil palm production can be balanced to ensure forest conservation.

This book features five peer-reviewed reviews on sustainable tropical forest management. The first chapter reviews environmental factors determining different types of tropical forest such as temperature, precipitation, sunlight, atmospheric and soil chemistry, as well as mechanical factors. The second chapter discusses definitions of sustainable forest management (SFM) and reviews how the current scope of SFM can be expanded from individual stands to the scale of forested landscapes. The third chapter considers the restoration of tropical forests, focusing specifically on forest landscape restoration (FLR). It begins by addressing the importance of implementing forest landscape restoration and provides an overview of different guides and tools for FLR. The fourth chapter summarises the current state of knowledge on the interactions between forest ecosystems and the climate system and the way in which forests influence the water cycle. The final chapter provides a detailed overview of recent research undertaken on achieving sustainable management of tropical forests. It discusses the importance of tropical forest ecology, as well as the role of SFM in contributing to achieving several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).