Improving restoration success through a precision restoration framework

Dryland ecosystems represent a significant portion of global land area, support billions of people, and suffer high rates of land degradation. Successfully restoring native vegetation to degraded drylands is a global priority and major challenge—highlighting the need for more efficient and successful restoration strategies. We introduce the concept of “precision restoration,” which targets critical biotic and abiotic barriers to restoration success and applies specific tools or methods based on barrier distribution in space and time. With an example from the sagebrush steppe biome, a North American cold desert, we present a framework for precision restoration in drylands that involves: (1) identifying site-specific critical barriers to restoration success, (2) understanding the spatial and temporal variability of each barrier, and (3) applying the best available restoration strategies given the specific barrier and its variability, described in the first two steps. This framework aims to enhance restoration success by focusing restoration practices on ameliorating the influential barriers when and where they occur and away from applying singular landscape-wide approaches.