Secondary tropical forests play an increasingly important role in carbon budgets and biodiversity conservation. Understanding successional trajectories is therefore imperative for guiding forest restoration and climate change mitigation efforts. Forest succession is driven by the demographic strategies—combinations of growth, mortality and recruitm...
In West Africa, very poorly documented are the recovery trajectories of secondary forests, and even less is known about the origin of the observed variability in recovery rates. To understand the relative importance of local and regional environmental conditions on these trajectories, we inventoried all trees larger than 2.5 cm DBH on 236 plots (0....
For monitoring and reporting forest carbon stocks and fluxes, many countries in the tropics and subtropics rely on default values of forest aboveground biomass (AGB) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventories. Default IPCC forest AGB values originated from 2006, and are relativ...
In West Africa, more than 80% of the original forest cover has disappeared due to the exponential growth of human populations in a recurrent search for new agricultural land. Once the fertility of the land is exhausted, these areas are abandoned and left to be reforested through natural succession. Despite the widespread presence of secondary fores...
Tropical Secondary Forests (SFs) are vulnerable forest systems growing in areas that have been subject to unsustainable human activities leading to deforestation. SFs account for swathes of tropical forest landscapes that have lost their capacity to provide a high level of goods and services. They are also located in highly dynamic and human-pressu...
In Côte d'Ivoire, more than 80% of the original forest cover has disappeared due to slash-and-burn shifting agricultural practices, uncontrolled logging, and large-scale land conversion for cash crop cultivation. Yet the demand for timber continues to grow and cannot be met by the scarcity of tree plantations. Despite the widespread presence of sec...
Identifying drivers behind biodiversity recovery is critical to promote efficient ecological restoration. Yet to date, for secondary forests in China there is a considerable uncertainty concerning the ecological drivers that affect plant diversity recovery. Following up on a previous published meta-analysis on the patterns of species recovery acros...
Old-growth tropical forests harbor an immense diversity of tree species but are rapidly being cleared, while secondary forests that regrow on abandoned agricultural lands increase in extent. We assess how tree species richness and composition recover during secondary succession across gradients in environmental conditions and anthropogenic disturba...
The rapidly growing human population in West Africa has generated increasing demand for agricultural land and forest products. Consequently 90% of the original rainforest cover has now disappeared and the remainder is heavily fragmented and highly degraded. Although many studies have focused on carbon stocks and fluxes in intact African forests, li...
