Restoring Atlantic forests with native species
Accelerating the restoration of Atlantic forest by using native tree species to enrich monocultures
Enrichment planting of native species is a promising technique for restoring tropical forests. Understanding native species growth behavior is key to tailoring enrichment designs that are realistically in line with economic and ecological goals and constraints.
Published in: Tree species growth under a rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) plantation: native restoration via enrichment planting in southern Bahia, Brazil New Forests, 45, 715–732.
Rappaport, D. I. & Montagnini, F. (2014).
We evaluated the potential of planting native species under a ‘nurse canopy’ of rubber plantations to restore Brazil’s most imperiled biome.
There is growing evidence that enrichment planting under plantations can promote the establishment of diverse understories and catalyze forest succession, yet further research into enrichment planting is needed to develop criteria for selecting species, sites and management practices. One of the main obstacles to cost-effective enrichment is the lack of ecological and silvicultural information on candidate species, particularly native flora. Within the Atlantic forest of Brazil, where many areas are characterized by very high species richness, information deficits can be quite large. As a result, it remains unclear whether enrichment planting has promise for widespread application. In this study, we ranked the growth of twenty-one native tree species of the Brazilian Atlantic forest 3 years after planting, and evaluated the effect of landform, successional guild and the basal area of overstory rubber trees on the planted species’ growth performance. The microclimate provisioned by the nurse canopy was the most important growth determinant among those measured. To better contend with existing knowledge gaps, long-term experiments are needed to monitor nurse-target species interactions over an array of resource gradients and silvicultural treatments. In this way, we can more adequately select appropriate species for restoration efforts while minimizing costly failures.