At the end of June, 2023, the Society for Ecological Restoration’s Natural Regeneration Network (SER-NRN) held its ‘launch’ webinar, titled ‘Communities harnessing natural regeneration in ecological restoration – case studies from  around the world.  This webinar will remain Open Access through the SER Webinar Library at this link

The webinar’s four speakers provided insights into their work using regeneration approaches – spanning four continents.  The first speaker, the widely published Robin Chazdon, shared insights about the natural successional recovery trajectories that occur in the wet tropical forests of Costa Rica after the adoption of policies to reduce livestock grazing in some agricultural lands. The Second speaker, Tony Rinaudo from World Vision, provided an extraordinary description of how he and local farmers in the Niger Republic and Ethiopia developed a system of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration that turned desertified landscapes back into productive native vegetation communities.

The third speaker, Ray Thompson, illustrated how the ingenious technique of water ponding triggered eroded Australia claypans to regenerate with native plants despite being bare for over a century. The final case study, presented by Anand Krishnamurthy from southern India on behalf of himself and Ramesh Venkataraman, illustrated how the Junglescapes Trust worked with villagers to achieve substantial revegetation success in degraded lands after a range of treatments to trigger natural regeneration.