Multidimensional tropical forest recovery
Resilient secondary tropical forests?
Although deforestation is rampant across the tropics, forest has a strong capacity to regrow on abandoned lands. These “secondary” forests may increasingly play important roles in biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and landscape restoration. Poorter et al. analyzed the patterns of recovery in forest attributes (related to soil, plant functioning, structure, and diversity) in 77 secondary forest sites in the Americas and West Africa. They found that different attributes recovered at different rates, with soil recovering in less than a decade and species diversity and biomass recovering in little more than a century. The authors discuss how these findings can be applied in efforts to promote forest restoration. —AMS
Abstract
Tropical forests disappear rapidly because of deforestation, yet they have the potential to regrow naturally on abandoned lands. We analyze how 12 forest attributes recover during secondary succession and how their recovery is interrelated using 77 sites across the tropics. Tropical forests are highly resilient to low-intensity land use; after 20 years, forest attributes attain 78% (33 to 100%) of their old-growth values. Recovery to 90% of old-growth values is fastest for soil (<1 decade) and plant functioning (<2.5 decades), intermediate for structure and species diversity (2.5 to 6 decades), and slowest for biomass and species composition (>12 decades). Network analysis shows three independent clusters of attribute recovery, related to structure, species diversity, and species composition. Secondary forests should be embraced as a low-cost, natural solution for ecosystem restoration, climate change mitigation, and biodiversity conservation.
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Science
Volume 374 | Issue 6573
10 December 2021
10 December 2021
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
Submission history
Received: 10 March 2021
Accepted: 6 October 2021
Published in print: 10 December 2021
Acknowledgments
This paper is a product of the 2ndFOR collaborative research network on SFs (www.2ndFOR.org) and the sDiv working group sUCCESS and is paper no. 7 of 2ndFOR. We thank the owners of the SF sites for access to their forests, all the people who have established and measured the plots, the institutions and funding agencies that supported them (see below), and M. Aide for data use.
Funding: This research was supported by European Research Council-ERC (Advanced Grant PANTROP 834775 to L.P.); German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig (sDIV W7.20 sUCCESS to L.P., N.R., and M.v.B.) funded inter alia by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; FZT-118); Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research - NWO (ALW.OP241 to L.P., M.T.v.d.S., and C.C.J.; ALWOP.457 to F.B. and R.Mu.; ALW 863.15.017 to M.L.; and Veni.192.027 to M.T.v.d.S.); NWO-Fundação de Amparo á Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo 17418 (NEWFOR) to P.H.B., F.B., and M.P.-C.; Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (FONDECYT Regular No. 1201347) to D.C.; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico-CNPq (to A.C.F., I.C.G.V.; 308471/2017-2 to M.M.E.-S.; 308877/2019-5 to Y.R.F.N.; #312178/2019-0 to B.A.S.; CNPq 308778-2017-0 to I.C.G.V.; CNPq to G.W.F.; Universal 01/2016 to H.M.T.; 309659/2019-1 to S.C.M.; and SinBiose-REGENERA 442371/2019-5 to C.C.J. and R.Me.); Corredor Biológico La Gamba (COBIGA) to F.O.; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (RU 1536/3-1 to N.R.); Fondo Mixto CONACYT-Gobierno del estado de Yucatán (FOMIX YUC-2008-C06-108863 to J.M.D. and J.L.H.-S.); Fundacão de Amparo à Pesquisa de Minas Gerais-FAPEMIG (to G.W.F.; PPM-00627-16 to Y.R.F.N.; PPM-00726-16 to M.M.E.-S.; PPM-00623-16 to M.D.M.V.; and APQ-03348-16 to H.M.T.); Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul-FAPERGS (2218–2551/ 12-2 to S.C.M.); Fundación Jardín Botánico de Medellín to A.I.; GEF/FONACIT to P.M.V.; German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, a research center of the German Research Foundation (DFG – FZT 118) (iDiv-Flexpool grant nos. 34600967 and 34600970 to N.R. and S.K.); Herbario JAUM to A.I.; Rainforest Luxemburg to F.O.; Secretaría de Educación Pública-Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, Ciencia Básica (SEP-CONACYT 2015-255544 to P.B. and F.M.); Stichting Het Kronendak to H.M.T. and H.F.M.V.; STRI, ForestGEO, Heising–Simons Foundation, HSBC Climate Partnership, Stanley Motta, Small World Institute Fund, the Hoch family, to J.S.H. and M.v.B.; Universidad de Antioquia to J.J.-M., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Programa de Apoyo a Proyectos de Investigación e Innovación Tecnológica (DPAGA–PAPIIT IN218416, DPAGA–PAPIIT IN217620 to J.A.M., E.A.P.-G. and R.Mu.; PAPIIT-UNAM IN211417 to P.B. and F.M.); Rufford Small Grants 19426-2 to F.M.; SENACYT Panama Grant (COL10-052) to D.H.D.; Tropenbos Foundation to H.F.M.V.; US National Science Foundation (no. 9208031 to D.H.D. and S.J.D.; EAR-1360391 to M.v.B.; and Graduate Fellowship to S.G.L.); Wageningen University and Research Interdisciplinary Research and Education Fund (FOREFRONT program) to F.B. and H.M.T.; and Yale-NUS College and MOE (through a startup grant and grant IG16-LR004) to M.v.B. A.H.-J. was supported by the LICCI project, funded by the European Research Council (FP7-771056-LICCI). This work contributes to the “María de Maeztu” Programme for Units of Excellence of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (CEX2019-000940-M).
Author contributions: L.P., B.H., D.C., C.C.J., M.T.v.d.S., L.A., F.B., C.E.F., R.L.C., S.K., J.A.M., R.Mu., N.N., N.R., and M.v.B. conceived the idea; all authors but C.E.F., S.K., and N.R. contributed data; B.H., D.C., C.C.J., M.T.v.d.S., and L.P. analyzed the data; L.P. led the writing of the manuscript with the help of B.H., D.C., C.C.J., and M.T.v.d.S.; L.A., F.B., C.E.F., R.L.C., S.K., J.A.M., R.Mu., N.N., N.R., M.v.B., A.M.A.Z., B.A., J.L.A., P.B., P.H.S.B., E.N.B., H.d.F., D.H.D., G.D., S.J.D., J.M.D., S.M.D., A.C.F., C.E.F., B.F., A.H.-J., J.L.H.-S., P.H., A.H.-J., J.K., S.G.L., M.L., R.L.-C., M.M.-R., F.P.L.M., F.M., S.C.M., A.E.N., F.O., E.O.-M., E.A.P.-G., B.X.P., D.P., J.S.P., S.R.-B., D.M.A.R., J.R., M.T., H.M.T., E.V.d.S.B.S., H.F.M.V., H.v.d.W., P.M.V., and G.W.F. commented upon the results and the manuscript; and all authors approved submission of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.
Data and materials availability: Data on relative recovery of 12 attributes and the code are available at Zenodo (44).
Authors
Funding Information
European Research Council: 834775
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research: ALW.OP241
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research: sDIV W7.20 sUCCESS
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Multidimensional tropical forest recovery: the missing (hydrological) link
Poorter and colleagues have done the scientific community a service by documenting the recovery of various tropical rainforest attributes during natural forest regeneration. Their message that many of these attributes may be recovered within several decades of (un-arrested!) vegetation succession is indeed a hopeful one. However, secondary tropical forests are not only important for biodiversity or the carbon they sequester. Equally important (also from a practical point of view) are questions like: “How do secondary tropical forests function hydrologically? What is their water-provisioning and flood-mitigating potential compared to old-growth rainforests? How much moisture do they return to the atmosphere via evaporation (to help cool the atmosphere and generate rainfall)?” Unfortunately, the authors did not cross disciplinary boundaries to team up with forest hydrologists and include the available information on changes in forest water use and soil hydrological functioning during tropical forest regeneration in their analysis. Had they done so, they might have discovered the more than 50 published studies on changes in soil infiltration capacity during tropical forest regrowth and plantation development (up to 100 if one includes comparative observations for pasture, fire-climax grasslands and old-growth forests) showing a clear sigmoid pattern of infiltration recovery with time (taking 2–3 decades). Likewise, data on soil water uptake (transpiration) for young (<25 years) regenerating tropical forests may be few and far between (~10 locations), they do show a strong positive relationship with stand leaf area index (after normalizing for net radiant energy inputs). With the UN Decade of Restoration well underway and countries and NGOs pledging to plant billions of trees in the years ahead, it becomes all the more important to step up efforts to quantify the soil and water impacts of (large-scale) forest restoration / reforestation activities across the tropical and Mediterranean climate zones. In short: on our bikes!
Full forest recovery takes over a century or more so we need to protect existing forest
It is heartening that this study, which compiles data from many sites in the American and African tropics, shows that tropical forests can naturally regenerate much of their diversity and ecosystem functions within a century from light- to mid-intensity land uses. However, it is important to recognize a few points. First, above-ground biomass, a strong indicator carbon sequestration and a goal of many forest restoration efforts to mitigate climate change, does not recover fully even after a century. This highlights the importance of better protecting existing forests, which store and take up carbon now. Second, chronosequence studies tend to preferentially select sites that have fast recovery (Reid et al. 2018). This point, combined with the fact that most of these sites were not intensively used by humans previously, mean that these results are a best-case scenario for recovery, so forest recovery is likely to be slower on average than what is reported in this article. Finally, as the authors note, for secondary forests to provide the most biodiversity and ecosystem function benefits they need to be protected for multiple decades. Various studies have shown that a large proportion secondary forests are recleared within a decade or two (Reid et al. 2019, Schwartz et al. 2020). This highlights the need for financial and policy incentives for landowners to allow secondary forest to recover on their land.
Literature cited
Reid, J. L., M. E. Fagan, J. Lucas, J. Slaughter, and R. A. Zahawi. 2019. The ephemerality of secondary forests in southern Costa Rica. Conservation Letters 12:e12607.
Reid, J. L., M. E. Fagan, and R. A. Zahawi. 2018. Positive site selection bias in meta-analyses comparing natural regeneration to active forest restoration. Science Advances 4:eeas9143.
Schwartz, N. B., T. M. Aide, J. Graesser, H. R. Grau, and M. Uriarte. 2020. Reversals of reforestation across Latin America limit climate mitigation potential of tropical forests. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change 3:85.