Integrating Societal, Stakeholder and Ecological Priorities in Riparian Woodland Restoration: Making Opportunity Maps Functional:Opportunities for modelling woodland creation

Introduction: Large-scale modelling of opportunities for woodland creation in a UK context is responding to government pledges to increase woodland cover from 14.5 to 17.5 % by 2050. Such mapping focusses on harnessing ecosystem services but fails to predict outcomes for ecological restoration. There is a need to address trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and nature based solutions, as highlighted in recent reports by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). <br/>Objectives: This paper explores the limitations of current approaches to modelling woodland restoration opportunities and the possibility of leveraging spatial-ecological and spatially-explicit deliberative methods to increase the functionality of opportunity mapping. <br/>Methods: Proposed riparian woodland creation sites in Grasmere (UK) were identified through the delineation of a variable width riparian zone and the application of land-use constraints employed in other large-scale woodland opportunity mapping in the UK. Riparian woodland creation was simulated emphasising alternately environmental goals(water quality management and bank stability), ecological function (habitat quality) and stakeholder preference. <br/>Results: This approach integrates environmental, ecological and stakeholder priorities into a spatially-explicit evaluation of habitat restoration opportunities. It is able to anticipate the interaction between these different dimensions, potential trade-offs and subsequent impacts on ecological processes of interest.<br/>Conclusions: This paper articulates the shortcomings of available approaches to modelling opportunities for habitat creation, identifies objectives for the development of more integrated methods and demonstrates how promising recent developments and avenues of inquiry can help to meet these objectives.<br/>Implications for Practice: Mapping habitat restoration opportunities is key to meeting nature recovery targets. Opportunity maps are typically predicated on the capacity of habitat to deliver ecosystem services but ecological processes and stakeholder preference are generally under-considered.<br/>An integration of methodological developments in spatial ecology and participatory geographic information science facilitates fine-scale modelling of environmental objectives informed by stakeholder preference whilst anticipating implications for ecological processes. Initiatives aimed at incentivising riparian woodland creation can leverage the approach described here to understand trade-offs between environmental, ecological and stakeholder priorities at the planning stage so that processes relevant to ecological restoration are not compromised. <br/>