Forest and landscape restoration (FLR) is a powerful strategy for large-scale tropical forest recovery, and payment for ecosystem services (PES) is used to support FLR programs and projects on privately-owned land. In this article, we discuss the lessons learned from the Water Producer Project, a pioneer, multiple-stakeholder, and PES-supported FLR project in the Atlantic Forest, south-eastern Brazil. The project was implemented in four landscapes located in two municipalities.

In fire-adapted conifer forests of the Western U.S., changing land use has led to increased forest densities and fuel conditions partly responsible for increasing the extent of high-severity wildfires in the region. In response, land managers often use mechanical thinning treatments to reduce fuels and increase overstory structural complexity, which can help improve stand resilience and restore complex spatial patterns that once characterized these stands. The outcomes of these treatments can vary greatly, resulting in a large gradient in aggregation of residual overstory trees.

Forest fragmentation and degradation are a problem in many areas of the world and are a cause for concern to land managers. Similarly, countries interested in curtailing climate change have a keen interest in monitoring forest degradation. Traditional methods for measuring forested landscape pattern dynamics with maps made from classified satellite imagery fall short with respect to the compatibility of their forest definitions with information needs. In addition, they are not easily amenable to interpretation using tools like confidence intervals derived from survey sampling theory.