Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 283, Issue 1844, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2016.1451
Keywords
selective logging; tropical forest; forest restoration; biodiversity and ecosystem functioning; Sabah biodiversity experiment; Dipterocarpaceae
Categories
Funding
- Royal Society South East Asia Rainforest Research Partnership project [RS243]
- NERC Centre for Population Biology
- Earthwatch
- HSBC
- Shell
- Trekforce
- Operation Raleigh
- ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity
- Swiss National Science Foundation [31003, 127227]
- Darwin Initiative (UK DEFRA)
- University Research Priority Programme on Global Change and Biodiversity
- Zurich-Basel Plant Science Centre
- University of Oxford
- University of Zurich
- NERC Human-Modified Tropical Forests Programme BALI project
- UK Natural Environment Research Council [NE/K500811/1]
- Berrow Fellowship at Lincoln College Oxford
- NERC [NE/K500811/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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One of the main environmental threats in the tropics is selective logging, which has degraded large areas of forest. In southeast Asia, enrichment planting with seedlings of the dominant group of dipterocarp tree species aims to accelerate restoration of forest structure and functioning. The role of tree diversity in forest restoration is still unclear, but the 'insurance hypothesis' predicts that in temporally and spatially varying environments planting mixtures may stabilize functioning owing to differences in species traits and ecologies. To test for potential insurance effects, we analyse the patterns of seedling mortality and growth in monoculture and mixture plots over the first decade of the Sabah biodiversity experiment. Our results reveal the species differences required for potential insurance effects including a trade-off in which species with denser wood have lower growth rates but higher survival. This trade-offwas consistent over time during the first decade, but growth and mortality varied spatially across our 500 ha experiment with species responding to changing conditions in different ways. Overall, average survival rates were extreme in monocultures than mixtures consistent with a potential insurance effect in which monocultures of poorly surviving species risk recruitment failure, whereas monocultures of species with high survival have rates of self-thinning that are potentially wasteful when seedling stocks are limited. Longer-term monitoring as species interactions strengthen will be needed to more comprehensively test to what degree mixtures of species spread risk and use limited seedling stocks more efficiently to increase diversity and restore ecosystem structure and functioning.
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