Counterfactuals for Monitoring
Using national datasets to strengthen restoration monitoring.
Understanding whether changes in wildlife populations are driven by restoration or by wider environmental pressures is essential for assessing restoration success. Large-scale factors such as climate change, land use and weather can influence species abundance within and beyond a restoration site, making it hard to attribute observed changes to project actions.
Although counterfactuals are vital for robust evaluation, most restoration teams cannot collect control-site data due to financial constraints, limited access and capacity. At the same time, many European countries run long-term biodiversity monitoring programmes that generate standardised data at regional and national scales. These datasets have the potential to act as counterfactuals, but there is currently no consistent framework to guide their use.
What the project will do
This project will create methods and a practical framework to help restoration practitioners use national and regional monitoring schemes as counterfactuals. By combining existing biodiversity datasets with site-level observations, projects will be able to more confidently assess whether changes in target species are linked to restoration activities.
The framework will allow restoration teams to overcome the financial and logistical challenges of collecting their own counterfactual data by making effective use of monitoring information already collected by national bodies and volunteer networks.
Digging deeper into soil biodiversity in Portugal and Scotland
Fighting Fire with Nature: How Europe’s Restoration Projects are Tackling Wildfires
Landscape Fires and Drivers in a Restoration Context
