Restoring Iberian Mediterranean forests: Will the squirrel ever complete its journey?

Ancient chronicles refer to the Iberian landscape as a forested territory that a squirrel could potentially cross from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar. While insights from paleoecology have challenged this view and have shown the relevance of steppe and grassland ecosystems throughout the Quaternary, the fact is that ancient human interference have severely impacted the coverage of Iberian forest ecosystems. Will current trends of agricultural land abandonment and restoration EU policies reverse this situation?  If so, how can we develop policies that contribute to forest restoration within the broader context of sustainable territorial sustainable management? and, finally, do we have the ecological and technical knowledge for successful planning and monitoring of restoration activities? We have followed a hierarchical and integrative approximation of landscape analyses, field and glasshouse experiments and mechanistic models to explore these issues. First, landscape ground cover and land use fluxes were analyzed from EU CORINE land cover data base over the period 1987-2000 and critical needs for forest restoration at a regional level were detected. Secondly glasshouse and field experiments were designed to detect critical bottlenecks in the revegetation process and species or genotype selection. Finally mechanistic models of forest dynamics were parameterized from experimental or forest inventory data to evaluate potential trajectories of change under different climate change and management  scenarios. This knowledge is integrated into a spatialized expert systems that can assist policy makers and local managers to plan and monitor the restoration programs within a territorial context.