Deforestation and forest degradation are having profound negative impacts on social-ecological systems in the emerging economies across the tropics. Consequently, interest in restoring and rehabilitating degraded forests has been growing. This paper explores current issues related to addressing forest degradation in the Lancang-Mekong Region (LMR) of Southeast Asia through a review of the use of criteria and indicators for forest degradation and rehabilitation. Forest degradation must be understood in the context of its underlying drivers, which are numerous and complex. Understanding these underlying drivers of degradation requires diagnosing the entwined political, social, economic, and environmental systems that affect forests. Landscapes are the relevant scales to diagnose and intervene for improved forests. Interventions to restore or rehabilitate forests should be process-driven, focused on the underlying social, ecological and political processes that degrade landscapes. Interventions should also include negotiation among all actors influencing and competing for natural resource claims in forest landscapes. Criteria and indicators for forest landscape restoration should therefore help to improve the governance of forest landscapes. Criteria and indicators provide measures of the biophysical outcomes of degradation, in addition to processes, but these should be adapted to changing contexts and emerging challenges, and should rectify any pre-existing flawed change-logic. Restoration activities should synthesize, integrate, and build upon the rich history of pre-existing restoration guidelines, but should be adaptable in order to be applied effectively in the contexts of local landscapes. This project is facilitating a dialogue around the use of criteria and indicators to help solve the degradation challenge in the LMR. We will trial the use of the criteria and indicators generated through this research in the LMR to learn what works and what doesn’t. This will provide an opportunity to build consensus around the ways in which restoration investments made by governments, civil society, and the private sector can influence sustainability.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of LyPB on the intestinal microflora of giant pandas with indigestion, using high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technology. The species distribution and microfloral density and diversity before and after administration of the LyPB probiotic agent were analyzed. LyPB evidently has the ability to adjust the floral imbalance in the panda’s intestine. To test the effects of LyPB on the microflora of the panda gut, fecal samples were taken from a healthy giant panda (Anan) without administration of LyPB and from a dyspeptic giant panda Yangyang before and after LyPB administration. Compared with the sample obtained from healthy Anan (anan-c) and that obtained from dyspeptic Yangyang before LyPB administration (yangyang1), the sample taken from Yangyang (yangyang2) after LyPB administration displayed a significant increase in the operational taxonomic unit index. An increase in the Chao index indicated an increase in the microfloral richness, while an increase in the Shannon index indicated an increase in microfloral diversity. At phylum and genus levels, a significant increase was observed in the density of probiotic bacteria of phylum firmicutes, genus Streptococcus, while a drastic reduction in the density of Escherichia coli/Escherichia coli Shigella/bacteria of genus Shigella was observed. Data obtained in this study shows that LyPB preparations successfully improve the microbial structure within the panda’s intestinal canal by significantly increasing the effective microbial community and decreasing the number of pathogenic microbes.