Biocultural Restoration of Kenyan Ecosystems

A series of ethnoecological surveys will be conducted in three demonstration ecosystems: a) montane forest; b) savannah and; c) coastal forests. The target populations are indigenous people with good knowledge on local flora and fauna and its traditional uses (both men and women). Key informants will guide the interviews until accumulation curves of new species and uses stabilize in each location. Information on the uses and utilities of species will be recorded based on ethnobotanical and ethnozoological understanding established from the literature and local expertise. This will comprise a database of plants, locations, uses and relative importance (measured with salience indexes) for local communities.

The second phase will generate maps of potential distributions of the biocultural core of species for the whole Kenyan territory. These models can thus be adjusted to climate change projections in order to help predicting species expansion and/or shrinking, can guide restoration and also help to estimate the potential losses and changes to ecosystem services associated with the biocultural core of species.

We will establish a network of experiments following a randomly stratified approach, to control for the most important local drivers of ecosystem change. For montane and coastal forest, we will establish a series of forest plots in restoration and natural regrowth areas to test the role and performance of different species from the biocultural core, controlling for functional attributes of plants. Additionally, we will monitor  ecosystem functioning, notably primary productivity (biomass) and soil properties. For the savannah site, we will establish a series of vegetation plots that can be manipulated to assess different drivers of vegetation change such as community assembly, recovery rates, community resistance and resilience to disturbance and nutrient addition. In all cases, we will follow experimental design that allows experiments to be part of worldwide networks of long-term experiments such as NutNet/Dragnet <https://nutnet.org/dragnet > (for grasslands) and 2nd For <https://sites.google.com/view/2ndfor > (for forests). This will allow the experiments established to follow world-class protocols for ecological studies and integrate locally conducted research with global networks of research, thus supporting the long-lasting of experiments in Kenya.