Ecological Restoration of Campos Sulinos Grasslands

Ecological restoration is an important activity to ensure biodiversity conservation and the provision of ecosystem services. It has been a growing field in the last two decades in Brazil, but mainly focused on forest ecosystems. The subtropical Campos Sulinos grasslands also experienced a growth in restoration studies, but considerably smaller and more recent. Restoration of grassland has fundamental differences from forest restoration due to intrinsic differences between these ecosystems. Subtropical grasslands have high resilience to endogenous disturbances (grazing and fire) and, contrary, low resilience to exogenous disturbances, such as land conversion. Given the current rates of land conversion in Campos Sulinos, its ecological restoration is urgent and still has a long way forward. In this chapter, we present the main threats to Campos Sulinos grasslands and discuss the legal aspects and demands for its restoration. Then, we present the state of the art of ecological restoration in the region, considering the three different scenarios of degradation: inadequate management, invasive species, and land conversion. Later, we discuss the regional main gaps and bottlenecks for ecological restoration and the ways to overcome them. At the end, we present the first results of two different projects that are under development: the test of a new technique to control an invasive grass, and the insertion of local communities in restoration projects. We hope that this material can be useful to boost future studies and projects of ecological restoration in the Campos Sulinos grasslands.