Best practice for the use of scenarios for restoration planning

Abstract Scenarios are important tools to facilitate the communication among scientists, practitioners, and decision-makers, and, thus to support policy and management decisions. The use of scenarios has an enormous potential to reduce ecosystem restoration costs and to optimize benefits, but this potential remains poorly explored. Here, we recommend and illustrate six best practices to guide the use of scenarios for planning native ecosystem restoration. We argue, first, for a participatory process to consider aspirations of multiple stakeholders along the whole scenario building process, from planning to implementation and review phases.