Biodiversity responses to restoration across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest

• Published in: The Science of the total environment Vol. 821; p. 153403
• Main Authors: Romanelli, João Paulo, Meli, Paula, Santos, João Paulo Bispo, Jacob, Igor Nogueira, Souza, Lukas Rodrigues, Rodrigues, André Vieira, Trevisan, Diego Peruchi, Huang, Chunbo, Almeida, Danilo R.A., Silva, Luiz G.M., Lopes Assad, Maria Leonor R.C., Cadotte, Marc W., Rodrigues, Ricardo Ribeiro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier B.V 15.05.2022
• Subjects: Abundance; Biodiversity; Brazil; Community patterns; Conservation of Natural Resources; data collection; deforestation; Diversity indexes; Ecosystem; Forest restoration; Forest structure; Forests; land use; landscapes; meta-analysis; prioritization; Soil; Brazil; Abundance; Diversity indexes; Forest structure; Forest restoration; Community patterns
• ISSN: 0048-9697; 1879-1026; 1879-1026
• DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.153403

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration is focussing attention and resources on restoration globally. Nowhere is this more crucial than in tropical forests that harbor immense biodiversity, but have also undergone widespread deforestation over the past few decades. We performed a meta-analysis to investigate how biodiversity features respond to forest restoration across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (BAF), one of the most threatened biodiversity hotspots in the world. We assembled biodiversity in different metrics of structure and diversity features of three taxonomic groups (vascular plants, soil microorganisms, and invertebrates), generating a dataset with 2370 observations from 76 primary studies. We quantified the incomplete recovery of biodiversity (i.e., the rate of recovery to a pre-disturbance state) occurring during the restoration process, which we called the ‘recovery gap’. Our results revealed that forests undergoing restoration in the BAF show a recovery gap of 34% for structure features and 22% for diversity features in comparison to reference reforests, considering all taxonomic groups investigated. For vascular plants, soil microorganisms, and invertebrates the recovery gap ranged between 46 and 47%, 16–26%, and 4–7%, respectively. Overall, the recovery gap was influenced by the interaction of restoration actions (i.e., the past land use, restoration age and restoration approach – active and passive restoration), however, structure features responded more sensitively to the time elapsed since restoration started, while the recovery gap for diversity features depended more on the past land-use. Our study can help guide the prioritization of the aforenamed taxonomic groups in restoration, the regulation of potential biodiversity offsetting policies in the BAF, and understanding how coupled biodiversity features respond to the interaction of environmental conditions and restoration actions in a high fragmented tropical landscape. [Display omitted] •Diversity features showed a smaller recovery gap in the BAF.•The recovery gap for structure features shortened after 20 years of restoration.•Recovery depended more on the taxonomic group than the biodiversity feature.•The recovery gap was higher for vascular plants than the other taxonomic groups.