Incomplete recovery of tree community composition and rare species after 120 years of tropical forest succession in Panama.

ABSTRACT: Determining how fully tropical forests regenerating on abandoned land recover characteristics of old-growth forests is increasingly important for understanding their role in conserving rare species and maintaining ecosystem services. Despite this, our understanding of forest structure and community composition recovery throughout succession is incomplete, as many tropical chronosequences do not extend beyond the first 50 years of succession. Here, we examined trajectories of forest recovery across eight 1-hectare plots in middle and later stages of forest succession (40-120 years) and five 1-hectare old-growth plots, in the Barro Colorado Nature Monument (BCNM), Panama. We first verified that forest age had a greater effect than edaphic or topographic variation on forest structure, diversi

SUBMITTER: Elsy AD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10952663 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature