Biomass recovery along a tropical forest succession: Trends on tree diversity, wood traits and stand structure

Resilience of Aboveground Biomass of Secondary Forests Following the Abandonment of Gold Mining Activity in the Southeastern Peruvian Amazon

“…This supports our results in SEM calculations and could explain why the AGB is higher in suction pumping mining forest stands. The positive relationship between AGB and tree species diversity found in suction pumping mining forest stands of the present study was reported by other studies in secondary forests [60,83,84] and old-growth forests [24,58,76,80,85]. Because of forest woody productivity, it is usually positively associated with tree species diversity [85].…”

“…The rapid recovery of forest structure compared to AGB, species diversity, and composition have been widely reported by previous studies [41,60,79]. In our study, after 15 years, mean height and mean DBH of suction pumping forest stands recovered at a much faster rate than those recovering from heavy machinery mining-88% of DBH and 84% of height versus 58% of DBH and 67% of height, respectively.…”

“…The negative effect of the distance from the forest edge was significantly greater in heavy machinery mining due to these lands being subject to high degrees of landscape fragmentation [74]. Meanwhile, in areas recovering from suction pumping mining, tree species diversity had a positive effect on AGB, as found previously in many studies [37,60,75]. This result indicates that these relationships are context-dependent [24], because the effect of the distance from the forest matters significantly in heavy machinery mining but not in suction pumping.…”

“…This may be related to differences in landscape fragmentation and proximity to the sources of propagules [82], as has been observed for other tropical forests [76,79] and secondary forests after mining in the Peruvian Amazon [41]. This difference in species composition and stand structure may have implications for biomass accumulation [30,99], due to the turnover of high wood density species [7,44,60] and the increase in species diversity [24,79,97].…”

“…Individual tree biomass values within the plot were summed and converted to AGB stock (Mg ha −1 ) [60]. In order to assess how fast the AGB of the secondary forest is recovering towards the values of the reference forest, we calculated the relative AGB recovery as the AGB of the secondary forest plot compared to the mean AGB of the reference forest plots in the study area [18].…”