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Restoration projects designed to promote one ecosystem service may have synergistic benefits to other services. Therefore, bundling them can be an effective way to maximize the return to the investments in programs of payments for ecosystem services (PES). Here, we investigated the additional gain of restoration actions—which were implemented as part of a PES program to protect a key watershed for water supply—on increasing functional landscape connectivity in the Atlantic Forest region of southeastern Brazil. Using a landscape ecology approach, we estimated the amount of forest cover before (2006) and after (2012) restoration activities by the PES program and changes in structural and functional landscape connectivity for birds with varying gap-crossing capabilities. Forest cover increased from 42.5 to 86.1 ha after the implementation of restoration projects by the PES program. In the simulated scenarios of landscape connectivity, the mean patch size of functionally connected forest increased by 1,034%, 392%, 248%, and 94% for species with gap-crossing capabilities of 0, 20, 40, and 60 m, respectively. Our results highlight the potential for incorporating biodiversity conservation objectives into PES projects primarily designed to enhance water-related ecosystem services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental legislation has fostered ecological restoration programs worldwide, but few studies have reported the outcomes for landscape connectivity. Here, we investigated the contribution of forest restoration programs planned to comply with the Brazilian Forest Code for increasing forest cover and landscape connectivity in agricultural landscapes of southeastern Brazil. We gathered data for 85 landscapes and 2,408 rural properties, totalizing 748,601 ha of farmlands within the Atlantic Forest biome and its ecotone with Cerrado, two global hotspots for biodiversity conservation. Together, rural properties account for 50,783 ha of native vegetation deficit found on Areas of Permanent Protection (APPs). On the basis of this, we performed a landscape connectivity analysis by simulating scenarios in accordance with the requirements of the legislation for two sugarcane mills that are already under ongoing restoration efforts. We evaluated the relative changes promoted by restoring all deforested riparian buffers within APPs, as determined by the Forest Code. The simulation of restoration at the property-level resulted in the reconnection of isolated forest patches, reducing their number in the landscape and increasing their overall and core size. At the sugarcane mill level, the restoration of riparian forests increased the index of connectivity. Despite these benefits, final forest cover (remnant plus restored forests) would still be reduced (<20%—the minimum forest cover on the private land to comply with the environmental law) in most landscapes and insufficient to conserve species sensitive to forest fragmentation. The mandatory restoration of riparian buffers plays a relevant role for improving landscape connectivity in human-modified tropical landscapes, but this strategy shall be complemented by other approaches to increase forest cover and landscape connectivity to mitigate the enormous species extinction debt accumulated for tropical forests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]