Scale-dependent community assembly facilitates effective tropical rainforest restoration

Abstract

Continued deforestation of tropical rainforest for agricultural purposes (such as setting up rubber and oil palm plantations) has led to continuous global warming, and warrant immediate restoration. It is widely assumed that community assembly should form the basis for performing tropical forest restoration. Yet, the practical procedures for a real-world translation of the concepts of community-assembly into tropical forest restoration remain poorly laid down. To address this challenge, we have developed strategies that were derived by investigating various community assembly mechanisms prevalent in nature, which include, abiotic filtering, niche-based competitive exclusion, and exclusion of weaker competitors. In an effort spanning of > 30 years, first, we determined the mechanisms that dominate the community assembly across different spatial scales in a primary tropical lowland rainforest in Hainan Island of China. For this purpose, a 15-ha natural forest area was investigated at spatial scales of 400, 900, 1600, 2500 and 10,000 m². Then, the outcomes of this investigation were used to develop a restoration strategy for reforesting 400 ha of aged rubber plantations. By using our strategy, 98.37% of this rubber plantation area has been now converted to a high-diversity tropical rainforest, which comprises of ≥ 198 local species, and is led by a local dominant tree species (Vatica mangachapoi). This outcome is better than those from the other global rubber plantation restoration projects, which do not use scale-dependent community assembly mechanisms, as rubber remains the most dominant tree species in those restored plantations. Thus, the framework provided here is highly effective for guiding future restoration of degraded tropical rainforests, which in turn would facilitate restricting the global warming to below 2 °C. This scale-dependent community-assembly framework holds broad transferability across the other degraded tropical regions worldwide.

Keywords

Biodiversity / Carbon sequestration ability / Degraded tropical rainforests / Functional trait / Global warming / Restoration / Rubber plantation

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Funding

start-up funding from Lanzhou University

National Natural Science Foundation of China(U22A20449)

specific research fund of the Innovation Platform for Academicians of Hainan Province

Rights & permissions

Northeast Forestry University