Mangrove forests are unique intertidal ecosystems connecting the land- and seascape. They provide habitat to terrestrial and marine species, sustain the livelihoods of millions of mostly poor people globally, and are considered as high priority habitats in climate change mitigation strategies, due to their extraordinary carbon sink capacity. Mangroves forests are degraded globally, with land use change being the single most serious threat at present. Successful restoration/rehabilitation of diverse, functional, resource-rich and resilient mangrove forests is a major development challenge in many countries, including Indonesia. The so called Blue Revolution - the conversion of mangroves to (unsustainable) aquaculture ponds in the 80s and 90s - is one major reason why the country has lost 40% of its mangroves over the last three decades. This has caused manifold problems for people's lives. Halting and reversing Indonesia's loss of mangrove natural assets is key to improve coastal livelihoods and reduce poverty. The Indonesian government currently spends around $13 million a year for planting mangroves on degraded areas. Most planting projects in Indonesia and elsewhere in the world have failed, and it is mostly understood why. There are however numerous critical information gaps in understanding how successful the "successful" projects are in regards to recreating diverse and functional self-organising and self-maintaining systems. CoReNat will investigate outcomes of established community-based mangrove restoration/ rehabilitation (R/R) projects in the heart of Wallacea - North-Sulawesi - Indonesia, to unravel whether these mangroves are "As good as (G)Old?". The overall project aims are to assess whether mangrove ecosystem biodiversity, functions, resilience and service provision have been restored, and to make evidence-based recommendations for maximizing the success of future R/R efforts in Wallacea (and beyond). Combining UK and Indonesian experience, expertise and scientific excellence, CoReNat will provide evidence-based recommendations to relevant stakeholder to guide future ecological R/R efforts. CoReNat takes a novel interdisciplinary approach to deliver a comprehensive ecosystem evaluation of established restored/rehabilitated and adjacent natural (reference) mangroves, bringing together paleoecology, geoscience, botany, zoology, environmental microbiology, ecological network analysis combined with next generation sequencing, toxicology and bioexploration. CoReNat will - provide new data on the region's (mangrove-associated) biodiversity and species interactions, for conserved as well as for rehabilitated/restored mangrove forests - apply and generate innovative new tools for the field of mangrove restoration - provide data that will allow a better understanding of the biodiversity, functioning and services of mono-specific versus multi-specific replanted mangroves - support the provision of solutions to mangrove conservation, restoration/ rehabilitation and management - explore current local use of conserved and restored mangroves, as well as potential new avenues for business and innovation, to help balance Indonesia's need for conservation with economic development

Deforestation and forest degradation are causing widespread loss of tropical biodiversity, profoundly impacting ecosystem functioning as well as stocks of natural resources and ecosystem assets (natural capital). The greatest reductions in diversity are experienced as forests are converted to permanent agriculture, a process that disrupts the delivery of important ecosystem services such as pollination and pest control. In contrast, the impacts from well-managed smallholder agriculture are less extreme, as the associated land parcels are typically embedded within landscape mosaics comprising fallows and forest remnants. Wallacea is currently emerging as a new developmental frontier in Indonesia and a target for agribusiness and extractive industries. A particularly understudied part of the Asian tropics, it has an exceptionally distinctive vertebrate diversity which forms the second highest level of endemism in the world, making the region a global priority for both conservation and ecosystem service provision. In addition, land-use history and current trajectories remain poorly understood, with the region notably omitted from recent deforestation baselines for this very reason. In fact, the diverse history of the Wallacea archipelago is acknowledged as a major source of uncertainty when applying land-use change models developed from elsewhere in Southeast Asia, as well as predicting the impacts of future environmental change. Given that further forest degradation and agricultural conversion are expected in Wallacea, the future prospects for natural capital in the region depend to a large extent on how we manage human-modified landscapes. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team from British and Indonesian universities, with four NGO partners active in Wallacea, this project will deliver the science needed to understand tensions in land-use and the responses of biodiversity to environmental change in Wallacea. We propose a novel and ambitious study of biodiversity responses to recent and historical land-cover change across multiple landscapes in little-studied islands, so that evaluations of current land-use policies and predictions of future environmental scenarios will be evidence-based and realistic. More specifically, spatial trajectories of land-cover change will be generated for each landscape, drawing from publicly-available remote-sensed data and local land-use plans. This will enable us to hindcast forest cover back to Wallace's time and forecast to key target years for international policy commitments (e.g. 2030 for the UN Sustainable Development Goals and 2050s for the UN Framework on Climate Change). Significantly, we will generate new biodiversity data from across land-cover gradients in forests, agroforests and intensive farmland (e.g. cocoa, oil palm, coffee), model community responses to past, present and future forest cover, and apply state-of-the-art genomics methods to assess genetic and evolutionary responses to land-cover change for several important conservation flagship species (NERC-Ristekdikti programme's Goals 1 and 2). Focusing on terrestrial vertebrates, the fauna that environmental policies aiming at safeguarding biodiversity are typically focused upon, we will track Alfred Russel Wallace's journey through Sulawesi and the Moluccas (Maluku). Finally, with collaboration from Project Partners with additional expertise in Wallacea, we will evaluate the impact of current land-use policies on ecosystem assets and dependent human beneficiaries, drawing on our land-cover, biodiversity and additional carbon and socio-economic data (Programme's Goals 2 and 3). Because many provinces in Indonesia are yet to implement newly-required spatial planning processes, our joint environmental research has an unprecedented opportunity to inform local development.

The Wallacea region, lying between the Borneo to the west and Papau New Guinea to the east, is one of the world's biodiversity hotspots, hosting incredibly high levels of biodiversity, much of which is unique to the region. This exceptional level of biodiversity and endemism reflects evolutionary diversification and radiation over millions of years in one of the world's most geologically complex and active regions. The region's exceptional biodiversity, however, is threatened by climate change, direct exploitation and habitat destruction and fragmentation from land use change. Continued habitat loss and fragmentation is expected to precipitate population declines, increase extinction rates, and could also lead to 'reverse speciation' where disturbance pushes recently diverged species together, leading to increased hybridisation, genetic homogenisation, and species' collapse. Already, approximately 1,300 Indonesian species have been listed as at risk of extinction, but the vast majority of the region's biodiversity has not been assessed and we lack basic information on the distribution and diversification of many groups, let alone understanding of what processes drove their diversification, how they will respond to future environmental change, and how to minimize species' extinctions and losses of genetic diversity while balancing future sustainable development needs. In response to the need for conservation and management strategies to minimize the loss of Wallacea's unique biodiversity under future environmental change and future development scenarios, we will develop ForeWall, a genetically explicit individual-based model of the origin and future of the region's biodiversity. ForeWall will integrate state-of-the-art eco-evolutionary modelling with new and existing ecological and evolutionary data for terrestrial and aquatic taxa including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, freshwater fish, snails, damselflies and soil microbes, to deliver fresh understanding of the processes responsible for the generation, diversification, and persistence of Wallacea's endemic biodiversity. After testing and calibrating ForeWall against empirical data, we will forecast biodiversity dynamics across a suite of taxa under multiple environmental change and economic development scenarios. We will develop a set of alternative plausible biodiversity management/mitigation options to assess the effectiveness of these for preserving ecological and evolutionary patterns and processes across the region, allowing for policy-makers to minimise biodiversity losses during sustainable development. Our project will thus not only provide novel understanding of how geological and evolutionary processes have interacted to generate this biodiversity hotspot, but also provide policy- and decision-makers with tools and evidence to help preserve it.