Monitoring recovery of tree diversity during tropical forest restoration: lessons from long-term trajectories of natural regeneration.

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

SUBMITTER: Chazdon RL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9661944 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature