NewLife4Drylands Protocol for dryland restoration in Protected Areas: an innovative tool to support restoration activities.

Land degradation processes have experienced a significant increase in recent decades, a trend that is projected to escalate further in the absence of any intervention. The need of adopting practices to contain, mitigate and restore degraded land have been stressed also by the new European Mission 'A Soil Deal for Europe'. To guide and support restoration actions, through a common and effective framework, an efficient monitoring approach and an adaptive ecological restoration process is needed. The NewLife4Drylands LIFE project provides a Protocol for design, implementation, and maintenance of restoration activities based on Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) within drylands. The Protocol, developed following the principles and inputs of some international restoration standards (SER, IUCN), is based on the identification and monitoring of degradation processes exploiting remote sensing capabilities, with the aim to integrate data derivation procedures into ecological restoration and maintenance activities. The Protocol is supported by a Decision-Making web-tool guiding trough the degradation processes, NBS along with indices/indicators with the aim to reduce the knowledge effort and helps in prioritizing options. The Newlife4drylands experience highlighted the heterogeneity and complexity of degradation processes, as resulted from a selected set of degraded pilot sites within Mediterranean Protected Areas, together with the issue for harmonization and standardization of ecological/physical indicators, especially those derived from satellite observations, when used as proxies of land degradation. The integrated use of both available field data (for short-term monitoring) and satellite data (for medium and long-term monitoring) have been explored to identify indicators for evaluating the effectiveness of planned restoration actions. This approach is geared, towards fostering adaptive and collaborative management of the ecological restoration process. Therefore, the Protocol acts as support tool for decision-makers, including public administration of Protected Areas, as well as technicians and planners. The proposed approach aims to raise awareness about the needs of drylands and opportunities provided by NBS. It serves as a guide for the identification of specific/local NBS for the restoration of drylands, beginning with the identification of degradation processes.