Brief: A floodplain is not simply land that floods, but a living system shaped by relationships among water, sediment, soil, vegetation, farming, livelihoods, living culture and settlement. Restoring it therefore means more than planting trees or improving an isolated plot: it requires rebuilding ecological functions and local stewardship with an understanding of the wider landscape. At REwild land restoration farm, small-scale interventions are used to test how land, livelihoods, learning and tourism can support one another across seasons. Their wider value lies in generating knowledge, capacity and forms of cooperation that can travel beyond the site and help places such as Hội A care for the landscapes on which their resilience and living heritage depend.
One place, two seasons
At REwild’s land restoration field site in Cẩm Phú, Gò Nổi, the same ground can tell two very different stories.
In the dry season, exposed soil hardens under intense heat. Young plants need help to establish. Water has to be caught where it falls, and every layer of leaves, straw or farm residue that protects the surface matters. Months later, heavy rain and river water may move across the land. The question is no longer how to retain scarce moisture, but how water can pass without carrying away soil, plants and the work already invested there.
If the work is judged only on planting, the task looks simple. Put trees in the ground, count them and photograph the result. The land restoration asks harder questions. Were the plants suited to the site’s changing water conditions? Can the soil absorb and retain more moisture? Can vegetation slow runoff and recover after inundation? Is there enough local knowledge, labour and finance to care for the site through several seasons? What happens beyond the edge of the plot?
Tree planting can be part of restoration. A tree can provide shade, hold the soil, create habitat or produce food. But a tree is an intervention. Restoration is the longer process through which ecological functions and human stewardship recover.
This distinction changes the scale of the work. A floodplain cannot be restored one isolated plot at a time if water, sediment, organisms, land uses and livelihoods continue to disconnect. Local action remains essential. Its design, however, has to begin with the wider living system.
A floodplain is more than land that floods
A floodplain is often described by its hazard: the area water enters when a river rises. That description is correct, but incomplete.
The river and the adjoining land form one ecological system. Periodic connections between them move water, sediment, nutrients and organisms. These movements shape soils, habitats, farming possibilities and the form of the river itself, as much as living culture of the inhabitants. Floodplain ecology has long recognised the flood pulse as a major force organising life and productivity in river–floodplain systems (Junk, Bayley and Sparks, 1989).
People are part of this system too. Fields, gardens, paths, homes, boats, markets and seasonal practices have developed in relation to water and how it shapes lands over time. Local varieties, ways of building, knowledge of plants and decisions about when to sow or harvest carry a memory of the landscape. A floodplain is therefore neither untouched nature nor simply agricultural land. It is an agro-ecosystem shaped by ecological processes and generations of human’s living culture.
Floods can destroy crops, damage homes and infrastructure, erode banks and place lives at risk. The lower Vu Gia–Thu Bon system also faces the opposite pressure: recurrent wet-season flooding alongside dry-season water shortages. Climate modelling indicates that extreme high flows may increase, while evidence from the basin also shows how difficult it is to plan with limited hydrometeorological data (Laux et al., 2017).
Climate is not the only force changing the system. Research in the Vu Gia–Thu Bon basin has found that dams and sand mining have altered sediment supply and river morphology over recent decades (Nguyen et al., 2024). Urbanisation, changing farming economies, riverbank disturbance and the loss of vegetation add further pressures at different locations.
These forces interact. A bank may erode because of local trampling or vegetation loss, but the water and sediment acting on it have been shaped elsewhere. A farm may struggle with poor soil structure, yet the available biomass, labour, markets and water all sit beyond the farm boundary. A village may face flooding as a local emergency, while the drivers and possible responses are spread across a much larger basin.
The implication is straightforward: the floodplain is not a collection of separate environmental problems. It is a connected ecological, environmental, economic, social system changing under several pressures at once.
Why isolated solutions fall short
A row of trees can be planted along a degraded land. Its survival may still depend on water velocity, grazing, species choice, supporting biomass and who is responsible after the project ends. Compost can improve one field. Its wider value depends on whether organic material is available, farmers can afford the labour, local crops have a market and soil practices continue across seasons. A nursery can produce hundreds of plants. Restoration only advances when the right plants reach the right sites, establish successfully and remain under care.
Ecological restoration standards define restoration as assisting the recovery of a degraded ecosystem. They emphasise reference conditions, ecological integrity, measurable goals, monitoring and adaptive management—not the completion of a single activity (Gann et al., 2019). Tree planting is only one part of the whole restoration process. In practice, this means asking what function is being recovered and how the intervention connects to the surrounding system.
What landscape scale actually means
First, it follows processes across boundaries. Water moves from higher ground into fields and rivers. Sediment eroded in one place is deposited in another. Seeds, insects, animals, people, materials and finance travel through different routes. An useful intervention is designed in interaction with these movements.
Second, it recognises that the same landscape has several functions and several legitimate users. A floodplain may support food production, habitat, settlement, tourism, transport, cultural practices and flood conveyance at the same time. Improving one function can strengthen another, but trade-offs are real. Dense planting may support habitat in one location and obstruct access in another.
Third, it treats restoration as a social and institutional process. Landowners, farmers, residents, public agencies, tourism businesses, researchers and visitors hold different knowledge, authority, resources and risks. No single actor can restore the relationships among them by technical design alone.
Research on landscape approaches describes the same practical requirements: work across multiple scales, negotiate multiple objectives, clarify rights and responsibilities, strengthen local capacity and keep learning as conditions change (Sayer et al., 2013). The point is to create shared understanding and coordination for decisions in one part of the landscape to stop undermining another.
Landscape-scale restoration therefore needs two forms of work at once. It needs interventions rooted in particular sites. It also needs the connective work that relates those sites to wider ecological processes, community priorities and public decisions.
Restore function before appearance
A restored landscape does not have to look like a forest. In a working floodplain, recovery may appear as a more stable riverbank, soil that accepts water more readily, greater vegetation diversity, a field that needs fewer external inputs, a functioning habitat corridor or a local nursery supplying plants suited to different conditions. Natural regeneration is returning, soil cover is improving and local pressure has been reduced. In some places the most important action is planting. In others it may be protecting pioneer vegetation, slowing runoff, retaining biomass, changing grazing or cultivation, reconnecting habitat, or allowing the system time to regenerate.
The sequence matters. Diagnose the causes of degradation. Identify the functions that have weakened. Reduce the pressures that continue to damage them. Support natural recovery where it is possible. Add carefully chosen interventions where recovery is blocked. Monitor how the system responds and change course when the evidence requires it.
What the land at REwild is teaching us
REwild is a small working site in Gò Nổi floodplain. Its value lies in making the questions visible and testable.
The work spans two different land conditions with the village between them. Along the river, the concern is degraded riverine vegetation, exposure and the gradual recovery of a protective riparian layer. Further inland, the focus is closed-loop agroecology: improving soil, retaining water, using farm biomass, growing useful plants and testing how food production can contribute to ecological recovery rather than compete with it.
Seen as separate plots, these activities could become a list. Seen as one learning system, they test a more coherent proposition: can a village landscape strengthen the relationships among buffer vegetation, soil, farming, organic resources, local knowledge and livelihood?
The first lesson is to begin with water. Small micro-catchments and planting pits are being tested to hold rainfall near young plants during dry periods. Mulch helps protect soil and reduce moisture loss. After heavy rain, the same features must be observed for overflow, erosion and sediment movement. The measure of success is not that a technique was installed. It is whether the soil–water relationship improves without creating a new problem nearby.
The second lesson is to work with succession. Exposed land rarely moves directly to the desired mature vegetation. Pioneer plants create shade, root structure, organic matter and shelter for what can follow. Local nurseries and seed saving can make suitable plant material available, but species choice has to reflect the site’s water regime, soil, use and capacity for care. Natural regeneration is not careless work; it often depends on reducing disturbance and protecting the conditions that allow recovery.
The third lesson is that agricultural practice sits inside restoration. Organic material from farms, kitchens and gardens can return to soil through safe, appropriate pathways. Diverse planting, continuous soil cover and reduced dependence on external inputs can improve farm resilience. Yet “organic” does not automatically mean regenerative. A farm can avoid synthetic chemicals while still depleting water, simplifying habitat or relying on a livelihood model that cannot endure. The wider test is whether production renews ecological function and strengthens local capacity over time.
The fourth lesson is that stewardship needs a livelihood. Riverine land care, nursery work, monitoring, ecological farming and knowledge-sharing all require skilled labour. If this work depends only on short grants or unpaid commitment, the landscape loses capacity whenever a project ends. Farming income, restoration finance, public support, learning programmes and visitor revenue may each carry part of the cost.
These are early practices and propositions. Their ecological effects need monitoring across dry seasons, floods and changes in land use. What the site already provides is a place where farmers, community practitioners, public actors, researchers and visitors can examine the same system together—and where a failed assumption becomes visible quickly enough to learn from it.
The landscape also holds knowledge
Degradation is often described through what disappears physically: soil, vegetation, habitat or productive land.
When farming becomes less viable, fewer people learn how water moves through a field, which plants tolerate inundation, how biomass was returned to soil. When useful plants vanish from everyday landscapes, knowledge of their care and use becomes detached from practice. When young people see no respected role or income in land stewardship, knowledge can survive in memory but lose its pathway into the future.
This is why community capability belongs inside restoration. A nursery is not only a source of seedlings; it can be a place where plant knowledge is organised, practised and transferred. A farmer is not only a beneficiary of a land project; the farmer observes the landscape continually and makes decisions under conditions no short field visit can reproduce. A community learning programme is not separate from ecological work when it increases the number of people able to read change, care for a site and act with thoughtful process.
Restoring relationships between land and people is a centre of the work. Floodplain communities need new income, technology, services and choices. The question is whether development removes local capability from the landscape or gives it new forms, recognition and economic value.
Hội An begins beyond the Ancient Town
Hội An is usually seen through the streets, buildings and riverfront of the Ancient Town. Its history and identity, however, are inseparable from the Thu Bồn River and the wider landscape through which people, food, materials and knowledge have moved.
UNESCO describes the World Heritage property within its original river and seacoast setting, and recognises a historic landscape of river, seashore, dunes and islands. It also identifies annual flooding, urbanisation and climate effects as management concerns (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d.).
It implies that the destination cannot treat its surrounding rivers, farms, vegetation and villages as scenery belonging to another sector. The living heritage experienced in Hội An depends not only on conserved buildings, but also on communities, livelihoods, knowledge and ecological relationships that give the place continuity.
Sustaining floodplain villages is therefore relevant to the future of Hội An in two ways. Ecologically, the destination and its surrounding landscape share water, climate and land-use risks. Culturally, the villages retain practices and relationships through which Hội An remains a living place.
Tourism can become part of the restoration economy
Tourism already draws value from the floodplain: its food, river landscapes, village life, craft, living culture and sense of place. The more useful question is whether some of that value can flow back into the capabilities that keep the landscape alive.
At REwild, this is the purpose of Travel with Purpose and farm-based hospitality. Visitors can enjoy a meal, cycle through villages, work with plants, observe soil and water practices, and learn from local practitioners. Enjoyment matters; hospitality is first to connect with the desire to experience. But the experience can also make ecological relationships visible and create income for soil care, food system, facilitation and community learning, nursery work and stewardship.
When re-designed thoughtfully, tourism becomes more than an audience for restoration. It becomes one possible part of its local economy.
From a field site to learning infrastructure
REwild floodplain agro-ecosystem restoration learning hub creates a shared place to observe relationships that are normally divided across sectors and institutions.
Farmers can test whether a soil practice is workable. Researchers can connect measurement to repeated local observation. Public actors can see where land access, infrastructure or coordination constrains implementation. Tourism businesses can understand that landscape stewardship has real operating costs. Learners can move from abstract global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss to water, soil, vegetation and livelihood in one place.
The site then functions as learning infrastructure. It holds trials over time, retains memory between projects and allows different forms of knowledge to meet around the same evidence. What travels to another community is not a fixed model of a farm. It is a way of reading the landscape, identifying a useful entry point, testing a response and adapting it with the people who will carry the work.
For the many river villages of Central Vietnam facing some combination of flood, drought, erosion, agricultural transition and loss of local knowledge, this distinction matters. They do not need a copy of REwild. They may benefit from a process through which local practitioners can exchange experience, observe working options, adapt them to their own land and build the relationships needed to continue.
Landscape-scale change can begin in a small place when that place helps the wider system learn.
The better question
Restoration is often made visible through an object: a tree planting day, a garden, a compost pile. deeper result lies in the relationships around it.
Can water move through the landscape with less damage and greater benefit? Can soil retain life and support production? Can vegetation regenerate across connected habitats? Can farming sustain both livelihoods and ecological function? Can local knowledge remain active? Can institutions and finance support stewardship after the first intervention ends?
At REwild, we are working with small pieces of this larger question. Micro-catchments, soil cover, riparian vegetation, climate-resilient and culturally useful plants, closed-loop farming, community learning and visitor experiences are not separate projects. They are different entry points into one living system.
The better question for restoration is therefore:
Which relationships in this living landscape need to recover—and how can action at one site help that recovery continue beyond its boundary?
What practice has taught us
The floodplain agro-ecosystem restoration process does not separate water, soil, vegetation, farming and livelihoods in the way projects and institutions often do. A local intervention becomes meaningful when it restores a function and connects to the wider system that sustains it.
What we are still testing
GYC and REwild are testing how a small working site can strengthen soil–water relationships, riparian recovery, closed-loop farming, local plant knowledge and livelihood for stewardship—and how evidence and learning from that work can become useful to other floodplain communities.
References
Gann, G.D., McDonald, T., Walder, B., Aronson, J., Nelson, C.R., Jonson, J., Hallett, J.G., Eisenberg, C., Guariguata, M.R., Liu, J., Hua, F., Echeverría, C., Gonzales, E., Shaw, N., Decleer, K. and Dixon, K.W. (2019) ‘International principles and standards for the practice of ecological restoration. Second edition’, Restoration Ecology, 27(S1), pp. S1–S46. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/rec.13035.
Junk, W.J., Bayley, P.B. and Sparks, R.E. (1989) ‘The flood pulse concept in river–floodplain systems’, in Dodge, D.P. (ed.) Proceedings of the International Large River Symposium. Canadian Special Publication of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 106, pp. 110–127. Available at: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/bay_delta/docs/cmnt081712/sldmwa/junketal1989.pdf.
Laux, P., Fink, M., Waongo, M., Pedroso, R., Salvini, G., Tran, D.H., Dang, Q.T., Cullmann, J., Flügel, W.-A. and Kunstmann, H. (2017) ‘Hydrological and agricultural impacts of climate change in the Vu Gia–Thu Bon River Basin in Central Vietnam’, in Nauditt, A. and Ribbe, L. (eds.) Land Use and Climate Change Interactions in Central Vietnam. Singapore: Springer, pp. 123–142. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2624-9_8.
Nguyen, B.Q., Kantoush, S.A., Binh, D.V. and Sumi, T. (2024) ‘An assessment of uncontrolled human interventions on the contemporary sediment budget and morphological alterations of the Vu Gia Thu Bon River basin, central Vietnam’, Heliyon, 10(11), e31476. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e31476.
Sayer, J., Sunderland, T., Ghazoul, J., Pfund, J.-L., Sheil, D., Meijaard, E., Venter, M., Boedhihartono, A.K., Day, M., Garcia, C., van Oosten, C. and Buck, L.E. (2013) ‘Ten principles for a landscape approach to reconciling agriculture, conservation, and other competing land uses’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(21), pp. 8349–8356. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1210595110.
UNESCO World Heritage Centre (n.d.) Hoi An Ancient Town. Available at: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/948/ (Accessed: 9 August 2026).