Cause for hope: Secondary tropical forests put on weight fast [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Public Release: 3-Feb-2016

Cause for hope: Secondary tropical forests put on weight fast

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

How fast tropical forests recover after deforestation has major consequences for climate change mitigation. A team including Smithsonian scientists discovered that some secondary tropical forests recover biomass quickly: half of the forests in the study attained 90 percent of old-growth forest levels in 66 years or less. Conservation planners can use their resulting biomass-recovery map for Latin America to prioritize conservation efforts.

"Regenerating secondary forests could play a critical role in carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation" said Daisy Dent, a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama and a lecturer at the University of Stirling. "However, previous studies have tended to focus on single sites. This study brings together data from many sites that span the Neotropics. We illustrate that secondary forests are highly productive and resilient."

Less than half of the world's tropical forests are primary or old-growth forests; the rest are growing back after logging or other disturbances. The new study focused on secondary forests growing back on land almost completely deforested for agriculture. Although such forests are known to accumulate carbon rapidly, how quickly they recover and restore the ecosystem services provided by old-growth forest was uncertain because of inconsistencies in the methods used in previous studies.

This study was unprecedented in scope: 45 sites in eight countries, 1,478 study plots and more than 168,000 trees. Sites covered the full latitudinal range of the tropics, from 20 degrees north in Mexico to 22 degrees south in Brazil, and extended across areas of high-to-low rainfall and low-to-high soil fertility. The extent of forest cover in the surrounding landscape (indicating the availability of tree seeds for regeneration) and the intensity of prior land use was also considered.

More:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/stri-cfh020316.php