Increasing resilience is one way in which biodiversity conservation might benefit REDD+ (it is already clear that, overall, REDD+ can be expected to benefit conservation, although not universally (Miles and Kapos 2008)). Biodiversity is the variability among living organisms including that within species, between species and of ecosystems (UN 1992). Of these aspects, species diversity is most often addressed in the ecological literature. Forests vary in their diversity as a result of historical, random and environmental factors, including the extent of human impact. That is, biodiversity varies amongst intact, naturally occurring forest ecosystems, and is reduced by forest degradation and fragmentation. Planted forests tend to host less biodiversity than naturally occurring forest.

This report sets out to explore three related hypotheses on the factors affecting forest resilience.