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. 2020 Nov 10;15(11):e0242020.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242020. eCollection 2020.

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

Juan Manuel Díaz-García  1   2 , Fabiola López-Barrera  1 , Eduardo Pineda  2 , Tarin Toledo-Aceves  1 , Ellen Andresen  3
Affiliations

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

Juan Manuel Díaz-García et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Tropical forest restoration initiatives are becoming more frequent worldwide in an effort to mitigate biodiversity loss and ecosystems degradation. However, there is little consensus on whether an active or a passive restoration strategy is more successful for recovering biodiversity because few studies make adequate comparisons. Furthermore, studies on animal responses to restoration are scarce compared to those on plants, and those that assess faunal recovery often focus on a single taxon, limiting the generalization of results. We assessed the success of active (native mixed-species plantations) and passive (natural regeneration) tropical cloud forest restoration strategies based on the responses of three animal taxa: amphibians, ants, and dung beetles. We compared community attributes of these three taxa in a 23-year-old active restoration forest, a 23-year-old passive restoration forest, a cattle pasture, and a mature forest, with emphasis on forest-specialist species. We also evaluated the relationship between faunal recovery and environmental variables. For all taxa, we found that recovery of species richness and composition were similar in active and passive restoration sites. However, recovery of forest specialists was enhanced through active restoration. For both forests under restoration, similarity in species composition of all faunal groups was 60-70% with respect to the reference ecosystem due to a replacement of generalist species by forest-specialist species. The recovery of faunal communities was mainly associated with canopy and leaf litter covers. We recommend implementing active restoration using mixed plantations of native tree species and, whenever possible, selecting sites close to mature forest to accelerate the recovery of tropical cloud forest biodiversity. As active restoration is more expensive than passive restoration, both strategies might be used in a complementary manner at the landscape level to compensate for high implementation costs.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Map showing the study area, land-cover types, and the location of 36 study plots (black markers) in four vegetation types studied in the mountainous region of central Veracruz, Mexico.
Tree plantations include monocultures of bamboo, avocado and pine.
Fig 2
Fig 2
Species richness of amphibians (a), dung beetles (b) and ants (c) in four vegetation types. P = cattle pasture, PR = forest under passive restoration, AR = forest under active restoration and CF = mature cloud forest. Error bars denote 95% confidence intervals.
Fig 3
Fig 3
Mean abundance per plot of amphibians (a) and dung beetles (b), and occurrence-frequency of ants (c) in four vegetation types. P = cattle pasture, PR = forest under passive restoration, AR = forest under active restoration and CF = mature cloud forest. Error bars denote standard error. Values of statistical differences among vegetation types are provided in S3 Appendix in (Tables 1 and 2).
Fig 4
Fig 4
Dendrogram of similarity (Bray-Curtis index) and heatmap based on amphibian abundance (a), dung beetle abundance (b), and ant occurrence-frequency (c) in four vegetation types: P = cattle pasture, PR = forest under passive restoration, AR = forest under active restoration and CF = mature cloud forest. In all dendrograms: 0 = completely different and 1 = completely identical. Species names corresponding to each code are provided in S1 Appendix. Four ant species were only identified to genus level.
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Publication types

Grants and funding

This study is part of the fundamental science project “Atributos funcionales de especies arbóreas y los escenarios para la restauración del paisaje de bosque mesófilo de montaña en el Centro de Veracruz” funded by the Secretaría de Educación Pública-Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (SEP-CONACYT), numbers CB2014-238831-B. This article was written to comply with the requirements of the Programa de Estudios del Posgrado of the Instituto de Ecología A. C. for the doctoral studies of JMDG (CONACYT Scholarship No. 486768). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.