Fauna community trends during early restoration of alluvial open forest/woodland ecosystems on former agricultural land

Abstract

Vertebrate fauna was studied over 10 years following revegetation of a Eucalyptus tereticornis ecosystem on former agricultural land. We compared four vegetation types: remnant forest, plantings of a mix of native tree species on cleared land, natural regeneration of partially cleared land after livestock removal, and cleared pasture land with scattered paddock trees managed for livestock production. Pasture differed significantly from remnant in both bird and nonbird fauna. Although 10 years of ecosystem restoration is relatively short term in the restoration process, in this time bird assemblages in plantings and natural regeneration had diverged significantly from pasture, but still differed significantly from remnant. After 10 years, 70 and 66% of the total vertebrate species found in remnant had been recorded in plantings and natural regeneration, respectively. Although the fauna assemblages within plantings and natural regeneration were tracking toward those of remnant, significant differences in fauna between plantings and natural regeneration indicated community development along different restoration pathways. Because natural regeneration contained more mature trees (dbh > 30 cm), native shrub species, and coarse woody debris than plantings from the beginning of the study, these features possibly encouraged different fauna to the revegetation areas from the outset. The ability of plantings and natural regeneration to transition to the remnant state will be governed by a number of factors that were significant in the analyses, including shrub cover, herbaceous biomass, tree hollows, time since fire, and landscape condition. Both active and passive restoration produced significant change from the cleared state in the short term.

Active restoration facilitates bird community recovery in an Afrotropical rainforest

“…However, extrapolation from the linear model is likely to be too optimistic since natural succession processes are not typically linear; for example, the post-disturbance recovery of bird communities in naturally regenerating secondary rainforest fragments in India slowed down after approximately 25 years (Raman et al, 1998). Perhaps the slow recovery of certain characteristics of the forest (e.g., tree species composition and/or the number of large trees) could result in even slower recovery of the most specialised primary forest animals (DeWalt et al, 2003;Smith et al, 2015). Also, although the recovery time for species richness of many tropical animal taxa during tropical forest regeneration has been estimated to be 20 to 40 years, the species composition of birds appears to recover more slowly, with estimates ranging from 30 to 150 years (Raman et al, 1998;Dunn, 2004;Catterall et al, 2012;Thinh et al, 2012).…”

“…Forest restoration is aimed at accelerating the recovery of forest structure, ecological functioning and biodiversity towards those found in climax forest; yet, it is still poorly understood how effectively the overall biodiversity can be restored, including that of birds (Catterall et al, 2012;Smith et al, 2015). Birds are frequently used as indicators of change when studying the effects of anthropogenic disturbances to biodiversity and should therefore serve as a valuable indicator group when studying the recovery of biodiversity during forest restoration.…”

Comparing the success of active and passive restoration in a tropical cloud forest landscape: A multi-taxa fauna approach

“…tree density, basal area, and canopy cover) has been reported for active restoration, but results for species composition have been inconclusive [8][9][10][11][12][13]. Differences in vegetation recovery between active vs. passive restoration may affect animals [8,14]. Animals may respond actively to plant recovery [15] and can modulate ecological trajectories by providing important ecosystem functions, such as pollination, seed predation and dispersal, herbivory, and by affecting energy flows [16][17][18].…”

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functional Enhancement by Forest Restoration: A Meta‐analysis in China

“…In most cases shown in Figure 5 (12 of 15 pairwise groups: biodiversity and ecosystem function × four ecoregions × two comparison types, with one exception of biodiversity in the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau ecoregion in comparisons of restored vs degraded forest), passive restoration led to more increments of biodiversity and ecosystem functions and fewer differences with reference values than the active approaches did. This occurs probably because when plantations were established, considerable aboveground biomass was removed and site preparation, slash thinning and weed control can lead to little or no understorey herbaceous cover under plantations (Chen et al, 2005;Zheng et al, 2008;Berthrong et al, 2009), while natural regeneration may contain more mature trees, native shrub species and coarse woody debris than plantations (Smith et al, 2015). On the other hand, more of the local flora and fauna may prefer joining the developing vegetation than that in directed projects as sown or planted species often preclude the spontaneous establishment of less competitive species and lead to more homogenous environment (Tropek et al, 2012).…”