Restoration priorities for Caatinga dry forests: landscape resilience, connectivity and biodiversity value

1. Restoration actions can halt biodiversity loss and rescue its services. However, in order to be effective, priority areas for restoration should be chosen based on objective large-scale restoration planning. Here, a multi-criteria graph theory (GT) framework is proposed to indicate priority areas for active restoration, based on landscape resilience, landscape connectivity, and biodiversity conservation value, focusing on threatened endemic plant species.
2. We applied this GT framework to 10,406 catchment basins of the Brazilian Caatinga, the largest seasonally dry tropical forest of the New World. Vegetation cover and within-catchment connectivity were used to identify catchments of intermediate landscape resilience, which in principle offer more effective opportunities for restoration. Then, such catchments were independently classified into (i) three classes according their value for between-catchment connectivity and (ii) three classes of biodiversity conservation value, based o...