Documenting Restoration Efforts for Landscape Planning, Monitoring, Research, and Education in the Wet Tropics of Australia

ABSTRACT

Restoration of natural vegetation is affected by many factors. Success in restoration is increasingly linked with knowledge sharing on restoration planning, preparation, implementation, and maintenance. This trend is reflected in the emergence of regional and international databases that collate and store information on restoration projects and allow the extraction of this information by practitioners. Here we describe how workshops with restoration stakeholders and educational institutions identified ways to collate project-specific spatial and non-spatial data on large-scale tropical rainforest restoration projects in Far North Queensland, Australia. We show how this data is stored in a regional knowledge sharing restoration platform that facilitates the planning and improved implementation of future restoration projects, and the identification of site-specific restoration inhibiting and facilitating factors. We provide examples on how the database promotes regional partnerships in conservation and restoration efforts, and how it can be made easily accessible to practitioners and researchers. We demonstrate how the longevity of this database can be ensured by its integration into a curriculum of a tertiary educational institution and by its potential linkage with existing global databases.