Biodiversity recovery of Neotropical secondary forests

Rates of change in tree communities of secondary Neotropical forests following major disturbances.

Rates of change in tree communities following major disturbances are determined by a complex set of interactions between local site factors, landscape history and structure, regional species pools and species life histories. Our analysis focuses on vegetation change following abandonment of agricultural fields or pastures, as this is the most extensive form of major disturbance in Neotropical f...

Biodiversity Conservation in Production Forests

Quantifying the biodiversity value of tropical primary, secondary, and plantation forests.

Biodiversity loss from deforestation may be partly offset by the expansion of secondary forests and plantation forestry in the tropics. However, our current knowledge of the value of these habitats for biodiversity conservation is limited to very few taxa, and many studies are severely confounded by methodological shortcomings. We examined the conservation value of tropical primary, secondary, ...

The biodiversity values of European virgin forests

What makes virgin forests better forests? Biodiversity evaluation depends on the value systems of the stakeholders involved. Indicators for conservation value, ecosystem functions, wilderness, uniqueness, or species richness may not correlate, or even correlate negatively. Based on arthropod data from a comparative study in two types of virgin forests in core areas of the Carpathian Biosphere R...

Carbon pools recover more quickly than plant biodiversity in tropical secondary forests.

Although increasing efforts are being made to restore tropical forests, little information is available regarding the time scales required for carbon and plant biodiversity to recover to the values associated with undisturbed forests. To address this knowledge gap, we carried out a meta-analysis comparing data from more than 600 secondary tropical forest sites with nearby undisturbed reference ...