Journal article
Monitoring recovery of tree diversity during tropical forest restoration: lessons from long-term trajectories of natural regeneration
Royal Society of London. Philosophical Transactions B. Biological Sciences, Vol.378(1867), pp.1-12
2023
PMCID: PMC9661944
PMID: 36373917
Abstract
Given the importance of species diversity as a tool for assessing recovery during forest regeneration and active restoration, robust approaches for assessing changes in tree species diversity over time are urgently needed. We assessed changes in tree species diversity during natural regeneration over 12–20 years in eight 1-ha monitoring plots in NE Costa Rica, six second-growth forests and two old-growth reference forests. We used diversity profiles to show successional trajectories in measures of observed, asymptotic and standardized tree diversity and evenness as well as sample completeness. We randomly subsampled 1-ha plot data to evaluate how well smaller spatial subsamples would have captured temporal trajectories. Annual surveys in eight 1-ha plots were missing substantial numbers of rare or infrequent species. Older second-growth sites showed consistent declines in tree diversity, whereas younger sites showed fluctuating patterns or increases. Subsample areas of 0.5 ha or greater were sufficient to infer the diversity of abundant species, but smaller subsamples failed to capture temporal trajectories of species richness and yielded positively biased estimates of evenness. In tropical forest regions with high levels of diversity, species diversity from small sample plots should be assessed using methods that incorporate abundance information and that standardize for sample coverage.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Understanding forest landscape restoration: reinforcing scientific foundations for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration’.
Details
- Title
- Monitoring recovery of tree diversity during tropical forest restoration: lessons from long-term trajectories of natural regeneration
- Authors
- Robin Chazdon (Corresponding Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Tropical Forests and People Research CentreNatalia Norden (Author) - Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt (Colombia)-IBARobert K Colwell (Author) - University of ConnecticutAnne Chao (Author) - National Tsing Hua University
- Publication details
- Royal Society of London. Philosophical Transactions B. Biological Sciences, Vol.378(1867), pp.1-12
- Publisher
- The Royal Society Publishing
- Date published
- 2023
- DOI
- 10.1098/rstb.2021.0069
- ISSN
- 1471-2970
- PMID
- 36373917; PMC9661944
- Copyright note
- © 2022 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Organisation Unit
- Tropical Forests and People Research Centre; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; Forest Research Institute
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99585108702621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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