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These Biodiversity guidelines for forest landscape restoration opportunities assessments are intended to provide more context, more resources and fresh perspectives to the ongoing global interaction between biodiversity conservation and forest landscape restoration. They do so in the context of the methodology used by dozens of countries and jurisdictions to help practitioners working on identifying and realising their landscape restoration goals—and they should be interpreted as a companion to the Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM). Finally, these guidelines are intended to help practitioners translate and communicate the importance of their work into a biodiversity context, and to help mainstream biodiversity in other sectors. The result should be an assessment process that explicitly identifies options for the choice of and interaction among species in a landscape to produce the biological, social and ecological benefits that form the purpose for restoration. The landscape strategies that result from this explicit inclusion of scientific and traditional biodiversity knowledge will go far in ensuring that the significant investments made in forest landscape restoration can see returns that support the incredible diversity of life and culture.

The publication of this issue of Unasylva coincides with two important events for forests. The 196 Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have just convened at the Paris Climate Change Conference to broker a game-changing agreement on climate change. Also in Paris, the Global Landscapes Forum 2015 is hosting high-level discussions on the research and policy behind land-use issues. Forest and landscape restoration is a key piece in the puzzle.

From November 19th to 21st, 2014, a workshop was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to better understand the challenges and opportunities of natural forest regeneration and to construct an agenda for its inclusion as a major component of a largescale restoration initiative. Formerly forested areas with a high potential for self-recovery must be efficiently identified and the social and ecological costs and benefits of Natural Regeneration must be better understood. The specific objectives of the meeting were threefold: 1. To ensure that policymakers and practitioners are aware of low cost Natural Regeneration options and consider them as legitimate approaches in their restoration portfolio; 2. To develop a multi-sectorial framework for a low-cost restoration strategy based on Natural Regeneration, using Brazil as an incubator 3. To initiate planning for a global Natural Regeneration partnership to advance the framework in countries committed to ambitious restoration targets. The presentations and main results of the meeting have been compiled in this report.

This report presents and demonstrates possible solutions to implement two headline policy indicators listed under the biodiversity criteria: the EEA/SEBI2010 Indicator 13 ‘fragmentation and connectivity of ecosystem’ and the MCPFE 4.7 Indicator ‘Landscape level forest spatial pattern. Focus is clearly on large regions assessment and on the change in the forest landscape structure (spatial pattern), not its function or quality. A brief review of knowledge enabled to select important concepts and principles to address spatial pattern processes likely to have ecological effects. It is proposed to make the assessment at local level with relatively fine-grained data and the reporting per spatial units which best capture local processes without loosing too much information. In some cases, forest losses must be disaggregated from forest gains and treated separately. Measures for MCPFE 4.7 are based on (1) the morphology of the forest cover in terms of core forest (interior forest with a 100m edge width) and forest edge, also providing an insight on connectors, and on (2) the landscape context of forest in its close (50 ha) surroundings (natural context or mixed forest-non forest interface zones with agriculture and/or infrastructure). The temporal stability of core forest (i.e. forest potentially staying in the same conditions), the increase of edges and the loss of forest in a natural context are measured. For the SEBI2010 indicator 13, fragmentation is looked upon when associated to core forest loss and each of the four spatial pattern processes (attrition, perforation, shrinkage, fragmentation/breaking-apart) that potentially contribute to four effects (sample, area, edge, isolation) on forest habitat and species is quantified. Measures on forest connectivity combine the landscape and organism dimensions; they account for the habitat availability and inter-patch functional distances.