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Approaches to restore post-mining areas should provide sustainable solutions for recovering biodiversity and ecosystem services in regions experiencing massive deforestation. Key components that are impacted by surface mining activities and that restoration intervention should therefore target are biodiversity attributes and ecosystem service provisioning. The consequences of restoration decisions in post-mining areas in the Afrotropical region (here Ghana) remain understudied. To this end, l assessed levels of soil properties, biodiversity and ecosystem service in a post-mining area after two decades of active forest restoration by comparing them to attributes of the surrounding dominant land-use types. l hypothesized that (i) the interventions applied to restore and manage a post-mining area improve ecosystem attributes beyond conditions observed in the alternative dominant land-use types and even reaching levels comparable to reference forest (Chapter III), (ii) soil conditions and the functional structure of tree communities drive ecosystem functions and multifunctionality, with highest multifunctionality levels in the restored and natural forests (Chapter IV), (iii) the structure of tree communities coupled with pronounced climatic seasonality support a higher number of arthropods and arthropod functional groups particularly in the wet season and in structurally heterogeneous land-use types (Chapter V), and (iv) active forest restoration enhances the levels of ecosystem service provision similar to the reference forest with possible trade-offs or synergies among individual ecosystem services across forest types (Chapter VI). Chapter I provides an introduction to deforestation, and further highlights global and national initiatives, including active forest restoration, to reverse or minimize the impacts of tropical deforestation. Chapter II details the methodological approaches applied for sampling. Chapter III focussed on soil properties in addition to below and above-ground biomass of trees. The characteristic soil attributes for the restored forest were not significantly different from those in the reference forest, except for bulk density and base saturation, but differed significantly from attributes in all other land-use types. Chapter IV focussed on how the functional structure of tree communities affects the provision of ecosystem services. For functional composition, both the leaf economic spectrum and the seed mass dimensions separated different land-use types. Chapter V addresses the research question on how post-mining restoration affects arthropod communities. Communities of ground-active arthropods differed significantly between land-use types depending on the season. By quantifying the various ecosystem attributes in the field and transforming them into ecosystem service proxies, l could primarily identify synergies with no apparent trade-off between ecosystem services across the forest land-use types (Chapter VI).
Nature protection has been a challenge for a long time due to continuous activities that reduced ecological processes and functions of the natural environment. These ecological processes and function provide huge benefits to humans and their communities known as Ecosystem Services (ES). ES are the benefits people derive from natural ecosystems. Many policy measures such as legal and voluntary protections have been used to preserve ES. But continuous increasing threats on the natural environment show that additional policy instruments are needed to achieve targets for environmental protection and sustainability. There are increasing land degradation, desertification, flooding, water shortage, climate change, which is mainly due to the sinks in ES. The problem is that ES are often considered as free goods making it different for their preservation. Even though tax policy for payment for ES has been used to encourage their preservation, they are reducing in supply. This is due to social dilemmas like differences in preferences, free riders and “tragedy of the Common” problems that are usually the case in resource distribution. Therefore tax systems may not lead to substantial preservation of ES. This has been argued on using utility theories and introduced market-base instruments for preserving ES as one way of achieving policy targets for nature protection. But for this Market for Ecosystem Services (MES) to grow, incentive and motivation schemes are needed to encourage multi-actors interaction in them. This has led to the establishment of a Community-based Financial Participation (CFP) framework as incentive and motivation schemes for business development for preserving ES. This thesis uses socio-economic and ecological concepts to argue for MES and developed a business modelling framework with Petri net. This involves multi-actors’ interaction for the demand and supply for ES (multi-agent interaction) that are modelled for estimating their flows over a landscape for supporting policy targets based on market structures. It also modelled future scenario for achieving environmental balancing for preserving ES and provide a management framework for MES. The management scheme comprises of an estimating model for ES, and models for management scheme and CFP. This provides the basis of using Petri net modelling framework for CFP to foster the growth of MES as options for preserving ES. Petri nets modelling techniques is used in simulating multi-agent interaction for the demand and supply of ES that are couple with management and CFP models to form a unified system approach. Petri nets have been used in many disciplines, but this is the first attempt in its use for modelling ES. CFP has also been developed with the framework of the research for this thesis. UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Spreewald (BRSW) in the Lusatian region of south Brandenburg in Germany is taken as an experimental area for testing the concepts and models developed within the thesis research. The results of this thesis show that MES is a potential for achieving targets for preserving ES, which can contribute to nature protection. This has been justified through data sampling, analytical schemes and management support systems that have been provided in the business modelling and simulation framework in this thesis.