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PUBLICATION SPOTLIGHT
| Williams et al., 2024
In the face of decades of intense deforestation, forest restoration is a critical strategy for conservationists safeguarding biodiversity, storing carbon, and sustaining nearby communities. However, planting trees is costly, time-intensive, and often results in less biodiverse forests than natural regeneration. Researchers in Williams et al., 2024 used a Landsat-derived tree cover database and a range of biological and socioeconomic factors—ranging from land cover to climate data to road density—to build a model of where natural tropical forest regeneration occurred from 2000 to 2016. The model accuracy for classifying regrowth patches as plantation, open, or natural regrowth was 90.6%. Then, they modeled future natural regeneration across tropical forests, finding that 215 million hectares (over 530 million acres) have the potential for natural forest regeneration. If reforested, that land—larger than the entire country of Mexico—could sequester around 23.4 gigatons of carbon over the next 30 years. Over half of that land is in five countries: Brazil, Indonesia, China, Mexico, and Colombia.
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