Joyita Ghose

Tropical dry forests (TDFs) have a high level of diversity and endemism and hold socioeconomic value for human settlements located around them but remain outside the ambit of public and private conservation efforts (Banda et al. 2016, Miles et al. 2006). While they are among the most threatened biomes globally, there has been a limited focus within restoration ecology on these forests (Vieira and Scariot 2006). For example, between 2005 and 2018, approximately 75 percent of papers on tropical forests focused on rainforests, and only 25 percent were on TDFs, mainly based on research conducted in the Americas (Stan and Sánchez-Azofeifa 2019). Developing restoration strategies and interventions that are suited to specific biophysical and social contexts can be challenging in the absence of research and evidence. Several reviews on tropical dry forest restoration have been done for Central and South America (Griscom and Ashton 2011, Quesada et al. 2009). To date there is no such review on Asian dry tropical forests. I plan to conduct a review of research that has assessed restoration strategies in TDFs in Asia to assess the evidence on their effectiveness.