This panel explores how Africa's nature-positive initiatives and conservation solutions are creating a hopeful narrative for the continent and stand in stark opposition to the continent’s primarily negative portrayal in Western media.

Long-term ecological monitoring plots across Africa’s non-forested biomes are expanding. Forest plot networks worldwide have been extremely successful in improving our knowledge of tropical forest ecology. At the same time, as these monitoring efforts have developed, land use change has accelerated, removing vegetation entirely for intensive agriculture, or degrading it. Additionally, as climate change advances so do efforts to use nature to help enhance our mitigation and adaptation capacity. In the face of these challenges, long-term plot-based monitoring offers a wealth of detailed long-term, often repeat data. Given the broad expansion of the plot network out of forests into non-forests in Africa we have a unique opportunity to draw on existing knowledge and think of new ways for how we can maximise this wealth of small-scale data to inform and achieve management and conservation goals across Africa. In this session we seek to gather talks that have successfully utilised plot data to draw larger-scale conclusions that can be used to inform conservation and or management. We gather research primarily from Africa but also draw on other examples from other locations where these efforts have been successful. The session will culminate in a facilitated discussion to identify lessons learned to maximise knowledge sharing as the plot network in Africa grows.