Final Project Seminar Highlights the Breadth of Land Restoration
This Monday and Tuesday, the 2026 GRÓ LRT fellows presented their final projects during the Project Seminar at Keldnaholt. The seminar is an important milestone in the six-month training programme and brings together the work the fellows have developed during their time in Iceland.
This year’s presentations showed the wide range of topics within land restoration. The projects covered many different ecosystems and contexts, from green spaces in urban Mongolia to soil carbon dynamics in drylands, from mangrove monitoring in Kenya to wetland restoration in Zimbabwe, and from pollinator conservation in Reykjavík to erosion control on steep slopes in Rwanda. Together, they reflected the global scope of restoration work and the variety of challenges it addresses.
A key theme throughout the seminar was the link between science, people and decision-making. Fellows presented work that combined field methods, mapping, remote sensing and modelling with local ecological knowledge, stakeholder engagement, gender aspects and the social side of restoration.
The seminar reflected the strong professional experience the fellows bring from their home countries and workplaces. Their final projects are based on real-world challenges and contribute to wider questions in ecosystem restoration and sustainable land management, including how to measure ecological change, how to support meaningful participation, and how to design restoration that is effective and long-lasting.
The Final Project Presentation Seminar marked an important step towards the completion of the programme. After months of lectures, field training, discussions and independent work, the fellows had the opportunity to present their projects and connect their individual work to a broader discussion on restoration and sustainable land management. The GRÓ LRT team and supervisors are extremely proud of the fellows and the dedication, curiosity and hard work they have shown throughout the entire programme. Their commitment has been outstanding, and it has been a privilege to follow their progress and see how much they have grown, both professionally and personally
