A sea of flowers for the fight against sustainability crises

Native orchid species on a grassland in Northern Germany. Source: Alina Twerski

In this blog article, Vicky Temperton talks about her passion for grasslands and how grasslands can contribute to mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis. Recently she has been nominated to the advisory board on natural climate solutions to advise the ministry of the environment and the German government with her expertise. She did her PhD on trees under climate change conditions, but then switched to research grasslands, because she sees in this field more potential for the sustainability crises.

Vicky, you are dedicating much research and time to grasslands. Why?

There is a personal and a broader answer. Personally, I grew up in Luxembourg, right next to the grasslands, mainly meadows but also pastures with cows. And I also grew up next to forest. For me, a natural landscape is a biodiverse landscape: species rich grasslands and species rich forests. For example, my neighbour, she was from Italy, and she would go out with me into the grassland, and we’d pick the champignons. I also played football in them. So, I kind of got these relational values, those connection to grasslands from a very early age. Grassland was just the place where I lived, and it was and is massively important to me.

What is the broader answer to your passion about grasslands?

I did my PhD on trees, but then after that, my first postdoc in Jena was on degraded grassland and how it was recovering after pollution from the biggest fertilizer factory for phosphorus in the German Democratic Republic. Grasslands cover about a third to 40% of the earth. So, they are everywhere. And they contribute enormous amounts of biodiversity, or at least they used to, and they contribute enormously to the functioning of systems and landscapes and to their ecosystem services.

Why are grasslands so important?

Most of the plant species that we’re currently losing (the ones on the red list of endangered species), for example, in Germany, are species which live in grasslands. Our study (Staude et al. 2023) looked at species on the Red List and found out that 82% of the species on the Red List need high light and 61% need low nitrogen. Before we looked at the data, I would have said that the main driver for biodiversity loss was the nitrogen. But it’s actually even more the light. This was really shocking and eye opening for me.

Humans and other animals have lived with grasslands for millennia. Recent research has found out that this whole idea that the whole landscape before humans, was just forest is probably not correct. With more and larger herbivores around during the period since the last ice age, the co-called “Temperate Forest Biome” probably resembled wood pastures and woodland as well as thicker forest in many places. Pearce et al. (2023) have shown with their recent pan-European study of pollen evidence that the openness and darkness of what we call forest has been very dynamic over time. This affects what we consider to be the best reference conditions or goal for conservation or restoration.

Grasslands are important for people. There’s now a global grasslands dialog platform, run by the WWF that I’m a member of. We’re pushing this because we feel like this biome is being disregarded and not adequately given the attention it deserves considering it covers one third of the planet and is a baseline for many pastoralist cultures as well as rangeland communities. People do not see it or value it enough and this is visible in current science policy. It’s almost analogous with our society only considering men, not women or other genders, yet other genders make up a large proportion of society.

Source: Pixabay

Do you have an example for the disregarding of grasslands?

The Aktion Natürlicher Klimaschutz (ANK) of the German government is the largest environmental funding ever coming from the German parliament, and yet grasslands are not explicitly positioned in the programme description: analagous to their “disappearance” in the words agriculture, rangeland, or farmland, pasture, they are implicitly included in the chapter on peatlands (but these habitats are only one form of grassland, albeit the one that can store by far the most carbon than any habitat) and implicitly included in Urban Green Spaces, as we as well as the chapter on Soils. No-one deemed them important enough to have their own chapter – this could be called grassland blindness. I do find myself wondering, why we are so grassland blind as a society, when we know that to bend the biodiversity curve in Germany (and elsewhere), we would do well to invest a lot more in recreating species-rich grasslands.

To me, a grassland really involves people living in it or around it, often with their livestock or with wild animals, and managing it because otherwise you can’t have a grassland, you can’t keep it open, unless it’s super dry or super wet, or you reintroduce large herbivores.

That means, the perception about grasslands is also really about, if you see humans as part of nature or if you see them separately…

… yes, and the ironic thing is, people talk about forest as the only natural, but then they’re talking about something like a pine monoculture. In what way is this natural? That’s completely absurd. But we seem to have this ingrained view that everything should be forest. And that’s the natural state, and that grasslands are essentially degraded forests. But we have forgotten the large herbivores. Large herbivores were much more dominant in the past and therefore it was a much more open landscape. Also, fire keeps landscapes open.

This idea of what’s natural is very important. People often think that anything that was natural was the forest. Whereas to me it’s both, it’s going back to the Luxembourg story. Grasslands have been around even before humans, as a key component of the landscape (Pearce et al. 2023).

Forests are seen as important for climate change mitigation. What about grasslands?

There’s a big focus on the trees and, planting trees. But moorland, peatland – they’re grasslands – store way more carbon than the forest. Luckily now Germany has kind of understood this. And so, I’ve just joined the advisory board for the German government on natural climate solution, where peatlands are a major focus, as well as forests, urban spaces, soils, and the marine environment.

If you restore peatlands right and you have the water table at the right level, you can store enormous amounts of carbon. Additionally, a study from California (Dass et al. 2018) found that with business-as-usual climate scenarios, the grasslands will be the only remaining habitat that remains a carbon sink, and does not become a net source. Perhaps they have garnered less attention as they are often considered degraded forests, but studies such as Pearce et al. or the Wood Pasture Hypothesis do not align with this view.

When people are just planting trees, they’re not thinking about that there will be more fires because of climate change or more successful pest attacks as the trees weaken in climate change. The huge jarrah trees (Eucalyptus regnans) in Western Australia are keystone species for this wonderful habitat that has been successfully restored after mining, but the large trees are starting to die after temperatures of over 40 degrees in recent months. We need to factor these drivers of change into our response to global change. We are no longer living in a relatively stable world in terms of abiotic conditions, so when striving to mitigate climate change we need to consider the role of the current already changing environmental conditions.

Besides, trees often die anyway because they don’t establish very well (usually around 30% die after planting unless very good care is taken). After a fire, the carbon has gone again into the atmosphere. Therefore, we need to get that carbon below ground, whether it’s in a forest, a moorland, a peatland or a savanna. Grasslands have a lot of plant materials, roots, below the ground which is very good for carbon storage especially longer-term storage. I think this is the research that’s really important to do now: Find out, when grasslands can store carbon and for how long, and compare this across different habitat types. To what extent we have biodiversity and carbon and when not, and which management actions create which outcomes.

Grassland near Garlstorf at the Elbe

What are you exactly researching?

The big question in our Grassworks project is, what leads to success in grassland restoration. We have three regions: North, East and South of Germany with different partners and we’ve looked at over 180 already restored sites. It was a crazy job because, it took two years to do the field work. We’re doing it from an ecological, social and social-ecological perspective. We’re looking at the economics of grasslands, the value systems and leverage points and vector for change as well as the ecological outcomes of restoration. Some of the sites had as a previous land use grassland, some were crops, some were restored for a long time, some for less time. We have these different factors and then it’s a bit like a huge landscape experiment across the whole of Germany. We’re finally getting the results now, and I can’t tell you too much yet, except for the vegetation, it  is looking like the best option for ecological success in terms of plants is either to use direct hay transfer methods, or to sow wild seed mixtures if you want to recreate a meadow, but the answer does depend on which positive reference site you use – and the quality of these positive sites varies strongly across Germany.

The other research I’m working on with grasslands has a lot to do with history: Does it matter who arrives first or who arrives later? It’s called priority effect research. This is very interesting because you wouldn’t really expect it, but it can have a very big effect on productivity and biodiversity when certain plant species establish before others. In this experiment in the Lüneburger Heide, it’s called POEM – Priority Effect Mechanisms – there we sow either the grasses first and then later the other groups like forbs (fancy flowering plants) and legumes (such as clover) or the other way round. And then we also have a simultaneous treatment as normal in current restoration. The timing has an effect on the roots. We found that if you put the legumes, all the forbs first, astonishingly the roots go deeper. And we don’t know why. What we’re trying to find out now how persistent this effect is and whether we keep finding this effect across different experiments. Because if we could recreate this, then you might be able to have grasslands that are more adapted to drought, because they would have deeper roots and so be better adapted to finding water under drought conditions.

What do you want to examine in the future?

I want to go further in this story of biodiversity and carbon storage of grasslands: What leads to better carbon sequestration? How can you get the extra carbon into the soil? Does it stay there? There’s contradictory research at the moment. And what role does biodiversity play in this? Is the most carbon stored in the more biodiverse sites or not? And no one really knows this yet because it’s such a huge and challenging job to analyse this because soils are incredibly heterogeneous. Each area is affected by what was growing on it there in the past. Recent research on soil heterogeneity by the Thünen Institute for Climate Smart Agriculture (the group of Axel Don) is showing that soils can differ surprisingly strongly within a few metres of each other. The rock-based underneath is generally similar. It shows the power of the biota to change the soils.

I also want to expand my work on social-ecological aspects of restoration success. The biggest bottleneck for grassland restoration or biodiversity of grasslands is that they’re not valued enough and there are not yet incentives to maintain ore create new species-rich grasslands, especially for farmers. And so, it is also about the motivation for farmers to create specie rich grassland – giving them money and value from society for doing nature-friendly and carbon friendly farming as a contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation and bending the biodiversity curve. There isn’t much of an incentive right now.

Once we interviewed farmers in the Lüneburger Heide and asked, what’s keeping you from going for more of these GAP greening programs or getting the subsidies for that kind of thing? We had the hypothesis that the reason why they weren’t doing it was because it’s a lot of bureaucracy. Turns out, no, it’s actually what the others are doing. So, they’re looking at each other and deciding what they do based on their peer group. And this shows that there is a lever or change.

What should politics do?

I’m hoping, that when we finish the Grassworks project, that we’ll have some concrete recommendations. I think financial incentives could play a big role, but also the leverage related to connections and relational values, I think if people experience this kind of biodiversity more, if they’re used to it and seeing it in the landscape as well as knowing all the benefits we derive from it, I think then then they’d be more interested in saving or restoring it.

Interview by Mareike Andert

Read more about the topics here:

Dass, Pawlok et al. (2018): Grasslands may be more reliable carbon sinks than forests in California. Environ. Res. Lett. 13 074027. DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/aacb39.

Pearce, Elena A. et al. (2023): Substantial light woodland and open vegetation characterized the temperate forest biome before Homo sapiens. Sci. Adv. 9. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adi9135.

Staude, Ingmar R. (2023): Prioritize grassland restoration to bend the curve of biodiversity loss. Restoration Ecology, 31, 5. https://doi.org/10.1111/rec.13931

International restoration principles and their relevance for practice on the ground – insights from western Rwanda

Natural forest and restoration activties in western Rwanda.

Principles for natural resource management can serve many different purposes: they can simplify processes, facilitate negotiation processes between stakeholders, guide concrete action on the ground, and – in the best case – they can form the basis for success. Such principles also exist for ecosystem restoration.

Proper restoration is not that easy, but it is extremely important, as many ecosystems have been destroyed by humans. Healthy ecosystems are positive for human well-being and make us more resilient to sustainability crises such as global warming. It is ecologically, politically and socially challenging to get complex ecosystems with all their functions and processes up and running again. For that, various restoration guidelines exist. One set are the 10 “Principles to guide the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030”, which were developed by key restoration actors. Obviously, principles alone are not enough; their relevance in practice is crucial.

Therefore, Marina Frietsch and colleagues assessed “the perceived relevance of restoration principles in practice in a case study in Rwanda“. Their aim was “to assess to what extent the 10 international restoration principles put forward for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration are relevant to restoration practice among stakeholders in Rwanda.” To this end, they conducted a Q-study with 32 key actors involved in restoration interventions in western Rwanda. In a nutshell, study participants were asked to rank 20 proxy statements about factors that can contribute to successful restoration.

The analysis showed that the 10 principles are actually relevant in practice. The results can be clustered in such a way that three groups of stakeholder perspectives emerge, i.e. groups that have different opinions about what is needed for successful restoration:

Group 1: “You Can’t Treat a Disease If You Don’t Know the Cause”

Group 2: “Where Trees Grow, People Grow”

Group 3: “Real-World Knowledge Should Be the Foundation of Every Restoration Project”

Moreover, the participants expressed additional features that should be highlighted when discussing approaches for successful restoration practice:

1. restoring historical conditions
2. collecting baseline data
3. increasing local communities’ sense of ownership
4. pursuing a long-term vision for restoration activities.

Whereas the first two features are classical ecological priorities for restoration, the third is political in nature – this can be seen as connected to the current discourses on equity and justice in restoration issues. The fourth feature connects the other three by emphasizing that restoration is a challenging ecological, social as well as long-term task.

Although perspectives on what is important for designing and implementing restoration interventions in western Rwanda differ, they should be seen as complementary. Differing views on how to best approach restoration do not necessarily need to result in conflicts between stakeholder-groups, but can inspire integrated restoration activities that account for different needs and values – particularly in situations involving transdisciplinary approaches for deliberation and collaboration.

“The best part of this study was when participants reported back that the Q-method exercise inspired them to reflect their own attitudes and values regarding successful restoration and even sparked discussions with their colleagues”, says Marina Frietsch from SES-Institute.

For the Q-study, participants were given a scoreboard with 20 empty fields along a gradient from least to most important for successful restoration to sort proxy statements according to their own priorities. In a next step, they were asked to build towers using 60 LEGO bricks to illustrate the extent of application of each statement in practice.

Text by Mareike Andert

Read more about this topic here.

Marina Frietsch, Joern Fischer, Beth A. Kaplin, Berta Martín-Lopez (2024). The relevance of international restoration principles for ecosystem restoration practice in Rwanda. Restoration Ecology Vol. 32, No. 3, e14085

Stories and insights from the field

Felipe Benra talks about his fieldwork in southern Chile

Dr. Felipe Benra, SESI member and research associate in the professorship for sustainable landscapes at Leuphana University, just came back from field studies in southern Chile. He has very interesting insights to share about his journey and the case study – and so he wrote a super exclusive guest contribution for you. Enjoy!

In many places of the world, land surface to create traditional protected areas is scarce. So called “working landscapes” – the landscapes where people live, work and thrive – don’t seem to receive the attention they deserve. That’s why it came as a surprise to me when I realized during a field campaign in southern Chile that people are indeed very interested in conservation and restoration and that they want to be part of the solution.

Working landscape at its purest. A combination of pastures with linear features of tree cover. Multiple ecosystems services are provided here, for example fodder, timber, and aesthetic beauty. In the background the Andes Mountains at latitude 40°S. (Photo credits: Felipe Benra)

The main economic activity in the study area is agriculture with a focus on dairy farming. (Photo credits: Felipe Benra)

The fieldwork campaign was conducted on a dairy working landscape in southern Chile in the frame of a future application of a DFG Emmy Noether program. It consisted of interviews with landowners designed to obtain insights about motivations and values for restoration. Through a deep collaboration and understanding of the landowners’ culture in the area, we were able to conduct 100 interviews.
(By “we” here I mean myself and primarily my colleague Victor Vergara. He is a farmer’s son and therefore well acquainted with the area. That local knowledge seemed to pay off because he was welcomed there with open arms.)

The Chirre River: One of the seven investigated rivers. Many people own land along these rivers, making them key actors for restoration. Multiple species find harbor on the riverine forests. (Photo credits: Felipe Benra)

We got to know beautiful places which are not quite open to the public sphere, and we learned about geographies of several municipalities in the region. The idea of this case study was to understand the perspective and socio-ecological conditions of landowners/managers who own properties along seven rivers in the region. The selection of these rivers is based on their condition of linear landscape features that allow for several types of connectivity and for movement of local (and introduced) flora and fauna. We also wanted to see which type of land cover the landowners are willing to restore: Rather grasslands or forests (which are the dominant land covers in the study area)?

Many grasslands contain a rich diversity of native and introduced species. This shows a pasture that’s been mowed at its peak in late November. (Photo credits: Felipe Benra)

Exotic tree plantations pose risks for local biodiversity. In this case, eucalyptus are very fire prone and the shown stand will soon be clear-cutted. All understory (composed of native species) is removed as well. (Photo credits: Felipe Benra)

With the data collected through the interviews, we will now be able to make connections between social and ecological variables and find out how they interplay to possibly enable restoration.

Overall, we gained access to 100 properties with a total area of 13,968 hectares. Most of the landowners (95 %) agreed that we access their properties again in the future to establish experiments there. It is still up for question where exactly the experiments will be located (within the properties), but we will work on this as part of the proposal to DFG.

I am personally very happy with the field study and hope to obtain some nice insights – and why not come up with a couple of papers out of the data? Maybe you’ll even spot one or another here… ; )

If you’re interested in Felipe’s work and want to know more about it or follow his project-journey, contact him via e-mail (felipe.benra@leuphana.de) or keep track on any news about it on the SESI website.

Text by Isabelle Andres

Undoing the Damage – it’s Time for Restoration

Biodiversity loss, land degradation and climate change. Not a rosy outlook for 2024… Nevertheless, researchers are tirelessly searching for solutions. To that end, Joern Fischer is the coordinator of a DFG funded research unit entitled “A Social-Ecological Systems Approach to Inform Ecosystem Restoration in Rural Africa”. The research unit asks how ecosystems can be restored and looks at the ecological, social and social-ecological consequences of restoration measures.

Joern, you will spend a lot of time researching restoration of ecosystems in 2024. Why this topic of all possible topics?

A lot of damage has been done by humanity and it’s time to learn how to undo some of the damage. Restoration is one way of trying to do that. What I like about restoration is that it’s trying to do something positive rather than just trying to limit the negative that we’re doing. I like the idea of working on something that actually improves things.

What are your Good New Year’s resolutions that you have set yourself for this project?

The main thing is that we get off to a good start with the whole project team. At the end of January and early February, we have a kick-off meeting in Rwanda. One day will be solely devoted to meeting academics from the University of Rwanda and other academics in Rwanda. And the second day will be devoted to meeting NGO and government stakeholders. It’s super important for the project that we start to build relationships with our colleagues in Rwanda.

You want to develop a social-ecological systems approach to ecosystem restoration. What exactly does that mean?

The key thing about a social-ecological systems understanding as opposed to an ecological understanding with a bit of social science on top is that we are fundamentally interested in the interrelationship between people and nature. We see that the ecosystem provides benefits or disbenefits to people, and people shape the landscape through how they use and care for it.

A social-ecological systems understanding of restoration means that we don’t prioritize from the beginning either the ecology or the people. But we always think of this interrelationship. Conventional restoration thinking has often put the ecosystem first. Then there is this new development in which human wellbeing as an important outcome is emphasised, but this new framing sometimes forgets the ecosystems… We want to think about the interrelationship at all times, and do well in both dimensions.

What are your concrete plans for the project in 2024?

In addition to the kick-off workshop, we also have the first scoping field trips with the entire project team. We’ll be traveling around in multiple cars to different restoration sites to see how we implement the research we’ve planned. The social scientists with their savvy social science eyes and the ecologists looking at the landscape with the ecological eyes.

It’s a bit of a logistic nightmare right now but will be fun to have everyone out in the field at the same time and this will help to build the team and sharpen our research questions. Around May we will start with the actual field work and collect data.

What kind of data?

For example, data on vegetation and the different types of restored landscapes and not-restored landscapes, socio-economic surveys of households and interviews with people on how their livelihoods have changed with restoration activities. Afterwards it’s time to make sense of the first bits of data and try to see how everything comes together.

How is the project organised?

We have eight subprojects. Among them are a synthesis project and a so-called living lab where we co-create innovative restoration solutions together with local stakeholders.

How do you implement your research in practice?

We will focus on what we call social-ecological units. These might be certain parts of a certain landscape, and we will have many of these social-ecological units scattered throughout the region that we’re studying. The social scientists, the ecologists, the social-ecological scientists all focus on the same social-ecological units from their perspective. Sharing social-ecological units is going to be really helpful to integrate our findings later on.

What questions are you asking in 2024 to move the project forward?

For example, how have different types of restoration activities changed the vegetation and its biodiversity, structure and also function across the landscape? How has land cover changed over the last few decades? We also plan to reconstruct the historical trajectory before restoration, and then analyse the changes in landscape pattern as a whole. We will also start to look at households and their economies, asking how people are benefiting from restoration.

What answers and solutions are you hoping for in the Rwanda project in 2024?

Most importantly, we will have established the first rudimentary understanding of our social-ecological units. There are places in the landscape that are extremely diverse, where within just a few hundred meters you find banana plantations, home gardens, woodlot plantings, agroforestry sites, all within one little circle of just a couple of hectares or something. Then there are other places where it’s much more homogenous and you might have an entire hill covered by agroforestry. These places are very different, and we will start to have a first understanding how such places differ in terms of their social, but also their ecological outcomes.

We will also start to have a much better understanding of the key stakeholders in restoration and their dynamics, and quantify the quality of restoration already done. For example, a lot of the planting that is being done is eucalyptus trees, which are not native. Eucalypts are great in some ways, for example to stabilize soils or provide firewood. But ecologically they really aren’t that great. We will have a much better understanding of how restoration to date is working or not working after this first year.

Why did you choose Rwanda as the location for the research?

In 2012, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature together with the German government, launched the so-called Bonn Challenge. Different countries around the world pledged different amounts of land to be restored. Rwanda made one of the most ambitious pledges of all countries. Rwanda’s land was very heavily degraded, and hence, there’s a lot of potential for restoration. Rwanda recognized that for its people to survive and thrive, ecosystems need to be restored. There is a very strong, genuine interest by the Rwandan government to restore landscapes. And they’re interested in also learning from scientists what works well and what doesn’t work well. That makes it a nice testing ground for social-ecological restoration.

How do you feel about 2024 from a sustainability perspective?

I suspect things are going to get worse for the world for a little bit longer until they get better. And that sounds terribly negative, but I’m not even sure that it’s negative as such. Change has always been part of the world. And right now, I think unfortunately we’re seeing a series of changes that are very rapid and, in many cases, not very good for sustainability.

From a more hopeful perspective: We have this very unstable world right now. Instability is usually a sign of change. When systems become quite unstable, it means something’s going to change. And so, I think sooner or later things will change. But for now, I would predict that it’s going to continue to get worse before it gets better.

What could be the role of this project in Rwanda to shape this change?

The nice thing about our focus is that a lot of restoration is happening anyway, in Rwanda and elsewhere. The restoration is not happening because of us. We’re just researching it. As we’re coming up with findings and hopefully if we can develop good relationships with stakeholders, our findings are naturally interesting to the people there, to the stakeholders involved, to the government, to the NGOs involved. Often there’s money for implementing restoration actions, but not necessarily money to research in depth what works and what doesn’t work. If we can provide some insights for how restoration can be done better, then it can generate even better benefits for people or nature. And that’s where our research can really make a difference because there will be more trees planted and restoration activities going on in the future anyway.

Another thing is capacity building. We’re training some Rwandan colleagues, for example, as PhD students in our team and hopefully we’ll also be collaborating with the University of Rwanda in some other ways to build capacity.

Explore the research project here.

Text by Mareike Andert