Planting trees recovers 70 years’ worth of dead wood carbon pools in less than two decades

By Estefania P. Fernandez Barrancos, a PhD candidate in Biology at the University of Missouri – St. Louis and a fellow of the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center. Her most recent research paper in Forest Ecology and Management is freely available through March 9^th.

When most people walk through a forest the last thing they probably look at is dead vegetation, and unless you are an avid mushroom harvester you probably don’t even notice dead logs. However, dead wood stores an important amount of carbon. An amount important enough that if dead wood disappeared it could promote more changes to our already rapidly changing climate.

Mushrooms on a dead log. Photo: JL Reid.

Dead wood is also a crucial habitat for many organisms such as fungi, insects, and birds. Many insects and fungi use dead wood as a source of food and nutrients, and several species of birds are only able to nest in dead logs.

A Resplendent Quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno) exiting its nest inside a standing dead log to go harvest food for its fledglings. Photo: Estefania Fernandez.

Anthropogenic disturbances, such as logging and deforestation, can significantly decrease the amounts of dead wood present on the forest floor, sometimes leading to losses of up to 98% of dead wood. The implications of dead wood loss are potentially warmer temperatures due to the release of carbon contained in dead wood as well as the loss of habitat that is critical to many forest organisms. Tropical ecosystems contain some of the most biodiverse habitats on Earth, yet they are among the ecosystems that suffer the most from anthropogenic disturbance. For example, most forests in the county of Coto Brus in Southern Costa Rica, our study area, were transformed into cattle pasture or coffee plantations in the 1950s-1980s. Today, the landscape consists of a mosaic of cattle pasture, coffee plantations, and small forest remnants.

Deforestation to create farms and cattle pastures has decreased the amount of dead wood in southern Costa Rica. Photo credit: JL Reid.

Forest restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been damaged or destroyed (SER International Standards) and it has a high potential to reverse the problem of dead wood loss through different strategies. In the Tropics, the most common restoration strategies are passive and active restoration. Passive restoration consists of allowing an ecosystem to recover with minimal to no human input.  In contrast, active restoration consists of assisting the ecosystem in its recovery through actions such as tree planting.

Old-growth forest (A) and and two restoration treatments: tree plantations (B) and natural regeneration (C). Old-growth forests are ≥100 years old. Plantations and natural regeneration were 16-17 years old at the time of the study. Photos:  Juan Abel Rosales & Estefania Fernandez.

Recently, I studied the pattern of dead wood re-accumulation through time after disturbance in southern Costa Rica as well as the effectiveness of passive and active restoration at recovering dead wood as it is found in undisturbed forests. To evaluate dead wood accumulation through time, my team and I surveyed dead wood volumes inside 35 forest patches of increasing ages (from 3 to over 100 years old) that were former coffee plantations. We evaluated the effectiveness of active vs. passive restoration at recovering dead wood by surveying dead wood volumes inside 17-year old passive and active restoration plots and inside nearby old-growth forests. Our passive restoration treatment was represented by natural regeneration plots around which fences were established to exclude cattle and where vegetation was allowed to re-establish naturally. Our active restoration treatment was represented by restoration plantations, where seedlings of two native (Terminalia amazonia and Vochysia guatemalensis) and two naturalized (Inga edulis and Erythrina poeppegiana) tree species were planted 17 years ago to facilitate the re-establishment of vegetation. Our reference ecosystem included nearby old-growth forests over 100 years old.

Juan Abel Rosales measures the diameter of dead logs in order to estimate their volume in an old-growth forest in Southern Costa Rica. Photo: Estefania Fernandez.

To measure the diameter of dead, rotting logs, we measured the distance between two tent poles set vertically along the logs’ edges. Photo: Estefania Fernandez.

Jeisson Figueroa Sandí establishes a transect to evaluate dead wood inside a forest fragment. Photo: Estefania Fernandez.

We found that dead wood recovers following a logistic shape through time in our study area: volumes are low initially, increase rapidly, and then plateau. The low volumes of dead wood at the beginning of succession could be explained by the fact that most of the wood remains are typically harvested by local inhabitants after lands are abandoned in our study area. As pioneer trees recolonize abandoned coffee plantations and subsequently die, they produce dead wood. As the forest grows older, there is a mix of short-lived pioneer trees and long-lived trees which contribute to large amounts of dead wood on the forest floor through branchfall and their own deaths.

Dead wood volumes as function of forest age in a chronosequence of secondary forests in southern Costa Rica. Blue dots represent the raw data (i.e. course woody debris, or CWD, volumes per hectare). The red line represents the predicted values from a generalized linear model plotted using a smoothing function. Eight outliers that were included for the analysis where CWD volume per transect was ≥125 m³ha^-1 were removed for better visualization. CWD volumes in plantations (purple dot), natural regeneration (yellow triangle) and five nearby old-growth forests (green dot) are also represented. Mean CWD volumes per hectare for each restoration plot (n=5) and corresponding 95% confidence intervals are shown.

We also found that restoration plantations contain 41% of dead wood amounts found in old-growth forests, whereas natural regeneration only contained 1.7% of dead wood volumes found in old-growth forests. The extremely low recovery of dead wood in natural regeneration might be explained by the fact that our natural regeneration plots were dominated by exotic grasses which typically hamper tree colonization. If there are no trees growing in the plots, there cannot be dead wood either. This is an important finding, because it shows that restoration plantations area a faster and more efficient way to recover dead wood in this fragmented, pasture-dominated landscape, even though this restoration strategy might be more time consuming and expensive due to the costs and time of planting seedlings.

Overall, our study unveils an important forest process, showing that dead wood carbon pools recover following a dynamic logistic pattern through time in this Neotropical forest region. Knowing that dead wood is 50% carbon, our findings allow us to predict carbon stocks in Neotropical forests more accurately. Our study also shows that restoration plantations accelerate the recovery of dead wood carbon pools in this Neotropical ecosystem, and potentially promote the preservation of dead wood-associated biodiversity.

For more information, see our recent paper in Forest Ecology and Management, which is freely available online through March 8^th, 2022.

30 dump truck loads of coffee pulp help restore a Costa Rican rainforest

Rakan “Zak” Zahawi is the executive director of the Charles Darwin Foundation in Galápagos, Ecuador. He and his collaborator, Rebecca Cole, partnered with a coffee processing plant to repurpose farm waste and help restore a rainforest. Read more about the project in an open access article in Ecological Solutions and Evidence.

From the very first time I saw the results of the orange peel project on the ground back in 2004 I was sold! What a brilliant idea I thought – use the waste products generated from the production of orange juice (and any related citrus products) to regenerate degraded habitats where expansive dry forests were once found. The idea was Dan Janzen’s, an ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has worked in northern Costa Rica for the better part of 50 years. At the time I was working for the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) and given that I work as an ecologist in forest restoration, a colleague thought I might be interested.

One of thirty dump truck loads of coffee pulp, locally called brosa, spread on former farmland to restore rainforest in southern Costa Rica. Photo credit: Rebecca Cole.

The idea is simple, take truckloads of agricultural waste (in this case orange peels) and spread them in a layer ~0.5 m thick across hectares of extremely degraded land dominated by forage grasses. Under the tropical sun this layer generates an enormous amount of heat, and in the process of ‘cooking’ down it asphyxiates and kills the forage grass that is notoriously difficult to eradicate. At the same time, birds and other seed dispersers visit the site, attracted by the abundant larvae helping to decompose the material. The net result is a lot of organic material and nutrients and many seeds dispersed combining to help jump-start the recovery of a degraded habitat and return it to a forested state.

I never forgot that visit and over the years that I worked in southern Costa Rica as Director of the Las Cruces Biological Station (a field station run by OTS) I always thought of trying the study there. The difference was that there was no orange production in the region but another agricultural byproduct was widely available – coffee pulp waste! I wondered – could the results of the orange project be replicated with another agricultural waste product? While the idea was always on my mind, it took more than a decade for me to actually test it after Rebecca Cole, a long-term research colleague who was based at the University of Hawaii expressed interest in collaborating.

Before: a former cattle pasture in southern Costa Rica. Photo credit: Rebecca Cole.

During: coffee pulp piled half a meter high over the experimental plot. Photo credit: Rebecca Cole.

After: the area piled high with coffee pulp rapidly grew into a secondary forest (left) while the control area remained covered in pasture grass, as it has been for decades (right). Photo credit: Rebecca Cole.

With funds secured from the March Conservation Fund, we setup a modest pilot study with a 35 × 45 m plot buried half a meter deep. That’s 30 dump trucks – or 360 m³ of material! As with the orange peel study, this land was primarily degraded pasture and would have been slow to recover on its own. We monitored this and an adjacent similar-sized plot for 2 years and the results were nothing short of spectacular. While the control treatment languished with overgrown grasses with a few shrubs, the coffee waste plot was completely transformed. The grass was smothered and in its place a patch of young trees. All species were pioneers but they are nonetheless critical to the recovery process – and the fact that they dominated the entire plot was really promising. With time it is hoped that more mature forest species will come into this system and establish – and with a young canopy of pioneers providing a little shade, the conditions are perfect for this to happen!

Drone image showing the area where coffee pulp was dumped (left) and the control plot (right) after two years. Photo credit: Rakan Zahawi.

This study is a small pilot project, but the results speak for themselves. So does the coffee industry! Every year, millions of tons of coffee pulp waste are generated and finding a way to not only dispose of this waste in an ecologically sound manner, but also use it for habitat recovery is a win-win for everybody. It is exceedingly rare for industry to be able to pair up so seamlessly with conservation and restoration that it is hard to believe. Of course, there are hurdles – such as governmental regulations that manage such waste products, but the potential here is enormous.  And the next challenge before us is to see if we can bring this idea to scale and test the methodology across big areas of degraded habitat in the tropics. We will keep you posted!

Read more about this project in a recent open-access article published in Ecological Solutions and Evidence.

Do we really need to plant a trillion trees? Tree islands are an ecologically and economically sound strategy to facilitate tropical forest recovery

Karen Holl (UC Santa Cruz) and Leighton Reid (Virginia Tech) describe lessons learned from a 15-year study of tropical forest restoration in southern Costa Rica. Their new paper is published in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

It seems that everybody from business people to politicians to even Youtubers is proposing that we should plant millions, billions, or even trillions of trees. They cite a host of reasons, such as storing carbon, conserving biodiversity, and providing income. These efforts should be done carefully and with a long-term commitment to ensure that the trees survive and to prevent unintended negative consequences, such as destroying native grasslands, reducing water supply in arid areas, or diverting attention from efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Another important question is whether we really need to plant that many trees to restore forest. In a new paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, we summarize some the lessons we have learned about a different approach.

Volunteer plants tree seedlings in one of our plantations in southern Costa Rica. Photo: Karen Holl

Over 15 years ago, we set up an experiment in southern Costa Rica to test whether planting small patches or “islands” of trees could speed up forest recovery for a lower cost than typical tree plantations. The idea is to plant small groups of trees that attract birds and bats, which disperse most tropical forest tree seeds. The tree canopy also shades out light-demanding grasses that can outcompete tree seedlings. As a result, over time these tree islands spread as they grow and facilitate the establishment of a lot more trees.

Compared to tree plantations, the tree island approach has two major benefits. First, it better simulates the patchiness of natural forest recovery. Second, it costs much less than planting rows and rows of trees.

Trade-offs in forest restoration strategies. Planting fewer trees leaves more to chance and can require more time, but tree plantations are more expensive and leave a bigger ecological footprint. Our study tests an intermediate option, and after 15 years it appears to provide a good balance. Figure modified from Corbin & Holl (2012).

In our experiment, we planted tree islands that covered about 20% of a 50 × 50 m plot of former cattle pasture. We compared that to plots where no trees were planted (natural recovery) and to the more intensive and more typical restoration strategy of planting trees in rows throughout the plot (plantation). We repeated this set-up at 15 sites in 2004-2006.

Over the past 15 years, we have monitored the recovery of vegetation, litterfall, nutrient cycling, epiphytes, birds, bats, arthropods, and more. Our data reveal a few key lessons about how to restore tropical forests more ecologically and economically.

First, our data show that planting tree islands is as effective as bigger tree plantations, despite cutting costs by around two-thirds. Compared to plantations, tree islands have similar recovery of nutrient cycling, tree seedling recruitment, and visitation by fruit-eating animals. Both tree islands and plantations speed up tropical forest recovery compared to letting the forest recover on its own. After 15 years, cover of trees and shrubs in the island planting plots has increased from 20% to over 90%.

Drawing of our three treatments showing a few trees establishing in the natural regeneration plots, the tree island merging canopies merging in the island plots, and the rows of trees in the plantation. Artist: Michelle Pastor.

Second, we have found that larger tree islands are more effective than smaller islands in enhancing the establishment of fauna and flora, as larger tree islands attract more birds and shade out competitive grasses.

Third, while tree islands cost less than plantations, some landowners won’t use the tree island approach because the land looks “messier” than orderly tree plantations. Some people prefer to plant lots of trees that are valuable for timber or fruit, rather than having the diverse suite of species that are typical of a tropical forest. So, the tree island planting strategy will be more suitable in cases where the goal is to restore forest.

Natural recruitment of trees seedling in the understory of a canopy of planted trees.

Our results and those of others show that the tree island planting approach holds promise as a cost-effective forest restoration strategy in cases where there are seed sources nearby to colonize and animals to disperse them, and where the spread of tree islands is not likely to be slowed by fire or invasive species. But we need more long-term studies to judge whether tree islands will be effective in other tropical forest ecosystems and to test other questions, like how the particular tree species used affect forest recovery, or what is the best distance to leave between tree islands.

More broadly, our study shows that tropical forests can recover some species quickly but it will take many decades, or longer, for forests to fully recover. So, preserving existing rain forests is critical to conserve biodiversity and the services that intact forests provide to people.

Yes, carefully-planned tree planting can help accelerate tropical forest recovery. But, in many cases we don’t need to plant trees everywhere. Rather we should use restoration strategies that encourage trees to plant themselves.

To learn more about our research, read our new article in the Journal of Applied Ecology, visit our websites (Holl Lab, Reid Lab), or watch a 7-min. video below.

Karen Holl describes the tree planting restoration approach and our long-term experiment in southern Costa Rica.

Los investigadores principales describen el método de applied nucleation y nuestro experimento a largo plazo en el sur de Costa Rica.

Hard times for hemiepiphytes: Aroids have trouble making a comeback in second-growth forests

Estefania Fernandez Barrancos is a PhD student and Christensen Fellow at the University of Missouri St. Louis, where she is affiliated with the Harris World Ecology Center and the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. Estefania has previously written about how to restore bromeliad populations. Here she describes a recent study asking how well hemiepiphytic aroids recover in secondary forests in Panama.

Most people know aroids as the familiar swiss cheese plants found growing in hotels and shopping malls. But few people realize that the aroid family (Araceae) is the fifth most diverse plant family on Earth. These plants provide essential food and refuge for birds, bats, insects, and primates in tropical forests throughout the world.

Like many other plants, aroid populations are dropping because the rainforests where they live are being converted into farms. My new research shows that aroids are also slow to recolonize new forests that become available.

City aroid (left, Monstera deliciosa in a building), country aroid (right, Monstera sp. in a Colombian forest). Photo sources: Left – Maja Dumat CCBY 2.0; Right – Thomas Croat via Tropicos.

Before I describe that research though, here is some botanical jargon for the uninitiated. Epiphytes (a.k.a. air plants) are plants that grow on other plants (but not as parasites). Hemiepiphytes are plants that grow on other plants but only for part of their lives. Many aroids are hemiepiphtyes because they start life in the soil of the forest understory and grow until they find a tree. Then they climb up the tree and live above the ground, but they always keep a connection to solid earth.

To study their recovery, I surveyed hemiepiphytic aroids in native tree plantations (9-years old), natural secondary forests (8-14-years old), and mature forests (>100-years old) near the Panama Canal. These forests are part of Agua Salud – a tropical forest restoration experiment led by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. In the dense forest, I found aroids by looking for their stems coming down from the trees, then I followed the stem with binoculars until I found their leaves, which helped me identify the species. In all, I surveyed 1479 trees this way.

Estefania Fernandez (below) and field assistant Carlos Diaz (above) look for aroids in a mature forest tree in Panama.

I found out that there were virtually no aroids in secondary forests or plantations. I recorded more than 2000 aroids from at least ten species growing on trees in mature forest, but in secondary forests and plantations I found less than 1% as many aroids and only three species.

Why do aroids have recovery troubles?

One reason for the lack of aroids could be that seeds from adult aroids in mature forests can’t reach the new forests. This seems unlikely because all of the secondary forests and plantations in my study were close to mature forests full of aroids, less than one kilometer away. Also, birds that are present in secondary forests are known to eat aroid fruits and disperse their seeds.

Another reason could be that the young forest canopy is too open for aroid seeds to germinate and grow. Unlike most plants, some aroids start out life growing away from light and towards darkness. (This has another great word: skototropism). It seems counterintuitive since most plants need light. But it is actually a good strategy. By growing away from light, aroid seedlings are more likely to run into a tree, which they need to climb up into the canopy and get to the light that they need to photosynthesize. So it is possible that there is too much light in the young forests and it keeps the aroid seedlings from finding a host tree.

Whether dispersal or establishment limits aroids in secondary forests, it is likely that more time will help. As forests become older and darker and birds bring in more seeds, aroid populations should eventually begin to recover. My research suggests that there is a considerable lag time required for aroids to recolonize disturbed habitats such as secondary forests and plantations.

More importantly, my study highlights how important it is to hold onto old forests. Forest restoration is a poor substitute for mature forest conservation. To the extent that we can prevent older forests from being cut down, it will help preserve many species of aroids as well as other plant and animal species that are threatened by habitat loss.

Aroid being pollinated by scarab beetles at Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Source: www.aroid.org.

You can read more about Estefania’s research in her new open-access paper in Tropical Conservation Science, or on other posts from Natural History of Ecological Restoration (here and here).

What can bat poop tell us about past tropical landscapes?

Rachel Reid is a postdoctoral researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. She uses isotope chemistry to answer questions about ecology, geology, and conservation – including questions that can help build reference models for ecological restoration. Note: This blog is republished with permission from Amigos (No. 91 May 2019), the newsletter of Las Cruces Biological Station.

 Many people head to Costa Rica for spring break to see monkeys and sloths at Manuel Antonio National Park or to try their hand at surfing in the Pacific. While we did stop to gawk at the crocodiles that hang out under the bridge over the Tárcoles River with a busload of tourists, the goal of our trip diverged significantly from the spring break crowd – we were heading off the beaten path to southern Costa Rica to collect samples of modern and ancient bat guano (aka poop).

Bats sometimes visit the same caves over thousands of years, and the accumulated piles of guano offer a unique opportunity to study past environments. Just like a core of sediment from the bottom of a lake or the ocean, a core of bat guano collected from a cave contains useful information about the past, both recent and distant. The material at the bottom of the core is the oldest and that at the top is the youngest, so by sampling the length of a core, we can essentially take a short, stinky walk back in time.

We are interested in detecting changes in bat guano chemistry (particularly the carbon isotope values) through time as a way of evaluating what type of vegetation would have been on the landscape in the past. This works because information about the plants at the base of the food chain gets propagated up to the plant-eating insects and then to the insect-eating bats whose guano we’re sampling.

Like other animals, bats and insects both gain carbon and nitrogen through the food they eat. Bats eat insects, which are in turn eating the local vegetation. Different types of plants have different carbon isotope values, such that most trees and shrubs (C₃ plants) have much lower carbon isotope values than most grasses (C₄ plants). Shifts in tropical bat guano carbon isotope values, therefore, are indicative of landscape-level changes in vegetation between more open, grassland plants and tropical forest.

How does bat poop inform conservation?

In the late 1940s, southern Costa Rica was nearly 100% forested. We know this from aerial photos – the earliest ones are from 1948. In later years, aerial photos show that most of that forest was cleared for coffee plantations; two thirds of it was cleared by 1980, for example.

This recent deforestation has motivated forest restoration efforts such as the creation of biological corridors and international scientific studies. Nonetheless, several studies (such as this and this) suggest that extinction rates in this region may be lower than would be predicted from recent habitat loss. One explanation for this could be that the regional flora and fauna evolved for several thousand years in a mixed forest and non-forest landscape managed by humans. By piecing together records of past vegetation from bat guano cores, we’ll be able to gain a better picture of what the landscape would have looked like in the past and potentially refine landscape-scale conservation and restoration targets.

For this first trip, our goals were to visit several caves to collect samples and to scout out future sampling opportunities. Southwestern Costa Rica has the highest concentration of karst caves in the country, so we were in the right place. In four days of fieldwork we visited three different caves (two of them twice!), collected 77 cm of core material, and took dozens of samples of modern bat poop.

At Bajo los Indios Cave, also known as Corredores, along the Rio Corredor, we ventured into a restricted, elevated chamber in hopes of finding deeper, more protected accumulations of guano. We were disappointed to find that even in this higher chamber, the cave was very wet and muddy and any significant guano accumulations appeared to have washed away. We collected a guano/mud core anyway and we’ll see what we can learn from it.

The bat guano team. From left to right: Leighton Reid & Christy Edwards (Missouri Botanical Garden), Rachel Reid & Alice Xu (Washington University in St. Louis), and Jeisson Figueroa (Organization for Tropical Studies). Photo by Jeisson Figueroa.

Leighton Reid uses a peat corer to extract a sample of bat guano from a karst cave. Photo by Jeisson Figueroa.

One additional important piece to our project is to try to get a better idea of what modern insectivorous bats, such as the mesoamerican mustached bat (Pteronotus parnellii mesoamericanas), are eating. We’ll then use that information to better interpret our results back in time. We’re excited to start analyzing samples!

This pilot study was generously funded by grants from the Living Earth Collaborative and from the International Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability.

What does the Black-faced Antthrush tell us about tropical forest restoration?

Anna Spiers (University of Colorado Boulder) describes a recent field experiment done with Emma Singer (Hamlin College) and Leighton Reid (CCSD) during an Organization for Tropical Studies Field Ecology Course in Costa Rica.

Bird diversity and forest restoration are synergistic. Birds facilitate forest regeneration through seed dispersal, pest control, and pollination. Forest restoration replenishes lost bird habitat by providing food, protection from predators, and suitable territory for breeding and nesting. Monitoring bird communities in a regenerating forest is an effective strategy to gauge the success of restoration.

While some birds are flexible regarding the quality of their habitat, others require a narrower set of conditions to survive. One such bird is the Black-faced Antthrush (Formicarius analis), a medium-sized, ground-dwelling insect-eater, easily distinguished by its plaintive song and chicken-like strut. The bird spends its days flipping over leaves and sticks with its bill to expose tasty ants, beetles, and other arthropods (and sometimes small vertebrates). A member of a bird family highly threatened by forest fragmentation (Formicariidae), the Black-faced Antthrush is known to disappear from small forest fragments and to struggle crossing even narrow strips of open space. Finding such sensitive birds in a regenerating forest is a positive signal that forest restoration is increasing habitat for forest-dependent species.

Black-faced Antthrush (Formicarius analis) strutting across the rainforest floor. Image: Luke Seitz/Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (ML54054261).

Earlier this month, we did an experiment to find out how different forest restoration strategies affect the Black-faced Antthrush. Specifically, we tested whether the bird exhibited a stronger territorial response in tree plantations, naturally-regenerating secondary forests, or areas where patches of trees (tree islands) had been planted to stimulate forest recovery. We expected to find that birds would be more defensive of areas where trees had been planted, given that these areas had a more closed canopy and more leaf litter for the birds to pick through for arthropods.

Leighton holds up a speaker to conduct a bird call playback. Unsurprisingly, there was no response in this scrubby, abandoned pasture (one of the control points in our experiment). Image: Martha Bonilla-Moheno.

To test the bird’s territorial response, we amplified a locally-recorded sound file of the bird’s vocalization and recorded its response. We noted how long it took for the bird to respond, how many notes it sang in response, and how close it approached the speaker. For this species, a short call with 4 notes is a “hello”, but a long call with upwards of 12 notes is a warning to let the other birds know that this territory is taken.

Our study area at Las Cruces Biological Station in southern Costa Rica. Each of the two restoration sites contained a tree plantation, a natural regeneration area, and a “tree island” area where patches of trees were planted to kick-start forest recovery. Image: Google Earth 2018.

Antthrushes defended restoration areas where trees were planted

As we expected, Black-faced Antthrushes responded more quickly and more forcefully when we taunted them with calls broadcast from tree plantations and tree island plantings – an indication that they were expending more energy to defend these areas. However, we only found this at one of the two restoration sites. The other site was a veritable antthrush desert with not a single response during any of our trials. Leighton’s collaborator Juan Abel Rosales often finds Black-faced Antthrushes at both sites, but this second site is near a road and dogs occasionally wander into the regenerating forest, possibly causing birds to temporarily abandon this area.

Black-faced Antthrushes responded quickly and with many tooting notes when we played their song to them from tree islands, plantation, and mature forest, but they responded not at all in abandoned pastures or in natural regeneration. The data representing restoration treatments are from one site only – at the other site we recorded no birds during any trials.

Tree islands and plantation had a couple of habitat features that natural regeneration lacked. First, the understory was more open, providing ground-dwelling birds with greater visiblity. Second, planted areas also had deeper leaf litter, and leaf litter is essential for a bird that makes a living flipping leaves to find its dinner.

Understory comparison between natural regeneration (left) and a tree plantation (right). Both have been recovering for 15 years. Natural regeneration vegetation is thick and still grassy from pasture days. A closing canopy in the tree plantation produced a thinner, more visible understory, with lots of nice leaf litter, full of delicious arthropods.

So what does the Black-faced Antthrush tell us about forest restoration?

 It may be telling us two things. First, restored forests growing up alongside remnant ones can be valuable habitat worth defending. When birds spend time calling, that is time that they do not spend foraging, and they can pay a price with their energy budget. Second, tree planting may create habitat for these birds faster than natural forest regeneration – although natural regeneration is highly variable from site to site, and we only found a pattern at one site right next to an old-growth forest. Promisingly, we did not see a difference between tree islands and the tree plantation, which suggests that we could plant fewer trees and still see the return of a forest-dependent bird species within about 15 years.

For more information about the Islas Project (with the tree islands) see previous NHER posts here, here, and here. Thanks to Bert Harris for some of the ideas that we used in this project!

 

 

The ephemeral forests of southern Costa Rica

Damaged ecosystems don’t recover overnight, but sometimes that’s all the time that they get. CCSD scientist Leighton Reid describes new research about tropical secondary forests in southern Costa Rica, including how long these young forests last, what’s at stake, and how we can keep them around longer.

Regrowing tropical forests on marginal farm lands is one of the main ways that humans can prevent runaway climate change. With ample moisture and long growing seasons, tropical trees often can grow quickly and pull large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere, storing it in their wood and keeping it from trapping heat. At the same time, young forests provide habitat for plants and animals and improve water quality for humans, among many other benefits.

But even in a moist, tropical climate, trees don’t grow instantly. Typically, it takes many decades for a recovering forest to stock up all of the carbon that it can hold. And it can take even longer for some plants (like orchids) and animals (like antbirds) to return. If a forest starts to grow back, but then someone cuts it down again, these time-dependent benefits never accrue.

In other words, the hopes and expectations that many people have for young tropical forests depend on young tropical forests growing old. So do they? Our new study suggests not.

The Coto Brus Valley and Talamanca Mountains in southern Costa Rica. Photo by J. Leighton Reid.

To find out how long secondary forests persist, I teamed up with Matthew Fagan, a landscape ecologist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and Rakan Zahawi, director of the Lyon Arboretum, as well as two students, James Lucas at Washington University and Joshua Slaughter at UMBC.

We studied a set of historical, aerial photos from southern Costa Rica, which covered the time period from 1947-2014. Previously, Zahawi and colleagues had classified which areas in each photo were forest and which areas were farms or other non-forest land uses. By comparing the maps they made for each year, we were able to see where and when new forests appeared and how long they remained as forest before they were converted to some other land use (mostly farms).

The young forests did not last long. Half of the new forests disappeared before they were 20-years old. And 85% were cut down before they were 54-years old. Larger forests and forests near rivers lasted longer.

An isolated forest fragment surrounded by cattle pastures in southern Costa Rica. Photo by J. Leighton Reid.

First, the bad news. Twenty years is not even close to the amount of time it takes for a young forest to become as diverse as an old-growth forest. For example, vascular epiphytes like orchids and bromeliads take more than 100 years to fully recover in young forests.

Carbon storage will also take a hit. If forests elsewhere in Latin America are as ephemeral as forests in southern Costa Rica, then carbon stocking over the next thirty years may be reduced by an order of magnitude.

Ephemeral forests could just be a problem in Costa Rica, but another study shows that secondary forests in eastern Peru have even shorter lifespans. There, secondary forests are cleared at a rate of 3-23% per year. Compared to that, the 2-3% per year rate of loss in southern Costa Rica is considerably better. And that’s not a good thing. Clearly we need more research on secondary forest persistence from other places.

There is some good news, though. Even though many new forests were short-lived, the ones that survived were predictable. And if we can predict where new forests will survive, we should also be able to help them survive longer. Larger forests and forests close to rivers were cut down less often than small forests and forests far from rivers. This suggests that restoring large, riparian forests could be a smart investment.

Forests and cattle pastures in southern Costa Rica. Photo by J. Leighton Reid.

Governments and other organizations can also help forests persist by creating incentives for long-term forest management, providing resources to enable long-term management, and ensuring that local people will be able to enjoy the benefits that old forests provide.

We hope that this work will lead to stronger restoration commitments. Right now, dozens of countries are setting big targets for forest restoration. For example, in 2012 Costa Rica committed to restore a million hectares of degraded land by 2020 (an area about one fifth the size of the country). There is a great opportunity for Costa Rica and other ambitious countries to plan for long-term forest restoration.

If we can begin to restore a million hectares of forest by 2020, why not plan to restore a million hectares of 100-year old forest by 2120?

A trail through secondary forest at the Las Cruces Biological Station in southern Costa Rica. Photo by J. Leighton Reid.

For more information on this research, you can read our open-access paper in Conservation Letters or watch a video of Leighton Reid presenting to the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation back in June. Additional papers on restored ecosystem persistence are available here and here. This work is a product of the PARTNERS (People and Reforestation in the Tropics: a Network for Research, Education, and Synthesis) Working Group on Spatial Prioritization. Funding was provided by grant DEB-1313788 from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Coupled Human and Natural Systems Program.

Rules of thumb for tropical forest restoration

Sometimes farmlands quickly regrow tropical forests on their own, but other times they don’t. Dr. Karen Holl, a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, gives some rules of thumb for when we can save money on tropical forest restoration by letting nature do the work, and when we may need to invest in tree planting.

Ambitious targets are being set to restore tropical forest because of their importance in storing carbon, regulating water cycles, conserving biodiversity, and supporting the wellbeing of people who live in tropical countries. For example, the 20 × 20 Initiative aims to restore 20 million hectares of tropical forest in Latin America by 2020. This represents an area slightly smaller than the country of Ecuador. One big question is: How are we going to restore forests at this scale with limited funds?

One of the cheapest ways to restore forest is to let nature do the work and leave forests to recover on their own. This works in some sites where forests regenerate quickly. In other cases, usually sites that have been used intensively for agriculture, the land may be covered by tall grasses (up to 3 meters, or 10 feet high) for years. Our past research shows that even within a small region, the rate of natural forest recovery varies greatly.

Natural forest recovery is highly variable in southern Costa Rica, even after a decade of recovery. Left: slow recovery on a former farm, still dominated by non-native grasses, with an open canopy and little tree recruitment. Right: speedy recovery on a former farm, with virtually no grass cover, a closed canopy, and diverse tree recruitment. Photos by Andy Kulikowski.

So, how do we predict which sites will recover quickly and which ones need some help in the form of clearing pasture grasses and planting trees? If we could develop some rules of thumb it would help land managers to more efficiently allocate scarce restoration funds.

To answer this question, we drew on our long-term study on tropical forest restoration in southern Costa Rica. We have research plots at 13 different sites where we removed the land from agriculture and let the forest recover on its own. Each year we measure grass cover, tree canopy cover, and how many and what species of new tree seedling establish in the plots. We have also quantified the forest cover surrounding the plots, the nutrients in the soil, and how long cows had grazed the sites in the past.

We found that two easy-to-measure variables explained on average two-thirds of variation in forest recovery 7 years later; those were the amount of grass cover and tree canopy cover measured after only 1.5 years. Plots that had more canopy cover and lower grass cover early on had a closed tree canopy and lots of forest tree seedlings from many species after nearly a decade. We were surprised that the amount of surrounding forest cover and soil nutrients did not explain much of the variation in forest recovery.

Rules of thumb for predicting tropical forest regeneration on farmlands. Forests grow back quicker when there is not too much grass, a little bit of shade, and many tree seedlings already present. Illustrations by Michelle Pastor.

Of course, our results need to be tested in other recovering tropical forests. But, if they hold true, this is good news! It means that land owners and managers just need to wait a year or two and then measure the tree canopy and grass cover. If some trees have established and are starting to shade out the grasses, land managers can use the low cost method of leaving the site to recover naturally. If the site is mostly a monoculture of dense grass, then the site is a good candidate to plant native trees. Planting trees takes more resources since it is necessary to clear around the native tree seedlings for a couple of years until they grow taller than the grasses. At least now there are some general guidelines to help chose where to invest the extra effort.

For more information, see our new paper in Applied Vegetation Science. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

How to grow instant fig trees to restore rain forests in Costa Rica

CCSD scientist Leighton Reid and Lyon Arboretum director Rakan Zahawi write about giant fig tree cuttings: how to make them and why some grow better than others.

Choosing the right species to include in a restoration project is a hard choice, but in the economy of nature, some species earn a bigger ROI than others. For example, Pacific sea otters maintain kelp forests by eating sea urchins, and wolves in Yellowstone National Park allow aspen groves to regenerate by scaring away tree-munching elk. These vital creatures are called “keystone species” because they hold ecosystems together, much like the keystone in an arch.

A keystone and three keystone species. (A) This small keystone holds up an arch in the Shoenberg Temperate House at Missouri Botanical Garden. (B) Sea otters are keystone predators in kelp forests. Photo by Marshal Hedin CC-BY 2.0. (C) Gray Wolves are keystone terrestrial predators. Photo by Gary Kramer USFWS CC-BY-NC 2.0. (D) A keystone fig tree feeding a Knobbed Hornbill in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Photo by T. R. Shankar Raman CC BY-SA 3.0.

Plants can be keystone species too. Around the world there are about 800 species of fig trees, and they hold tropical forests together by providing food for a wide array of animals. On any given day, the busiest tree in a rain forest is likely to be a fig tree with fruits. Monkeys, birds, bats, and others gather at fig trees to eat, and in the process, they deposit seeds of other plant species that they have been carrying in their guts. This chain of events, repeated day after day, often turns the area beneath a fig tree into a hotspot of plant diversity.

A few years ago, we had an idea to plant keystone fig trees in young forests in Costa Rica. We wanted the figs to grow as fast as they could, so instead of planting seedlings, we planted cuttings – big ones. With help from our local collaborator, Juan Abel Rosales, we cut dozens of twelve foot-long branches from eight species of fig trees. We stripped off all of their leaves to keep them from drying out, and then we planted our figs trees in shallow holes.

Rakan Zahawi (delighted!) poses with a three year-old fig stake.

To our delight, many of the fig trees grew!

The ones that did the best came from a special group, the subgenus Urostigma. Many figs in this group have a unique life strategy. They begin their lives in the top of a tree when their tiny seeds are deposited on a branch by a bird or some other animal. As they grow in the treetop, they send long roots down to the ground, and these roots harden and fuse together, forming a lattice-like trunk. Over time, these figs kill their host trees by taking most of the water, nutrients, and light. They also keep the host tree from growing outwards, giving them the nickname “strangler figs”. Maybe the ability to transform a flimsy, dangling root into a solid trunk is related to these figs being able to grow from cuttings.

To find out how well our planted fig cuttings might survive over the long-term, we also tracked down some fig cuttings that we had planted in 2004. We were happy to learn that out of the trees that survived for their first three years of life, all of them were still thriving a decade later.

Full disclosure: planting large cuttings is not a new idea.  Farmers in many parts of the tropics plant trees this way to create ‘living fences’ – with all of the normal fixings like gates and barbed wire, but with a row of living trees instead of dead posts. The advantages for farmers are many – their fences don’t rot and fall apart (that happens quickly in the tropics); the trees provide shade for cattle; they have a constant source of new fence posts (by cutting off a limb); and in some cases they can feed the young shoots to livestock.

Big cuttings have big benefits for restoration too. Not only are planted trees already several feet tall, you also get to skip the pricey nursery phase, and, most excitingly, cuttings have a tendency to fruit quickly.

Some of our young fig trees are now making fruit, but we will have to wait a bit longer to see whether they start attracting more big animals and whether those animals carry more tree seeds into our young forests. For now, we can say that others who are interested in growing keystone figs for forest restoration may have the best luck by working with the stranglers.

For more information, please take a look at our open access paper on this project in Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation and prior blog posts here, here, and here.

How to grow an instant fig tree. (A) Remove a long, thin branch segment from an adult tree. The red arrow shows a cut branch. (B) Strip the cuttings of their leaves to keep them from drying out, then carefully transport cuttings so as not to damage cortical tissue. Here, cuttings are padded by a foam mattress. (C) Remove the bark from a ring on the cutting to promote root growth. Here, a ring is being cut about 20 cm (8 in) above the base so that it will be just below the soil surface when planted. (D) Dig a shallow hole and plant the cutting. Be sure that the cutting is firmly planted to prevent it from toppling, but take care not to compact the soil too much around its roots. Photos by Rakan Zahawi.

 

Fig Stakes: Shoreline Restoration for a Costa más Rica

Andres Santana is the graduate program coordinator at the Organization for Tropical Studies. During a recent fieldtrip in southern Costa Rica, he and CCSD restoration ecologist Leighton Reid compared notes on using fig stakes for ecological restoration.

Tropical beaches are many things to many people. To plants, beaches are hot, sandy, and salty – complicating their restoration.

Costa Rica has 1228 km (763 mi) of coast line – including 1016 km on the Pacific side and 212 km on the Caribbean. Along Costa Rica’s northern Pacific coast, the beach forms the natural edge of the dry forest. Farther south the adjacent forest is more humid. Giant trees, 40 m or more in height, grow right up to the high tide mark, particularly along the Caribbean.

But as with so many tropical ecosystems, Costa Rica’s coastal forests have been subject to human impacts. Many shoreline forests were cleared for cattle ranching, and exotic grasses were introduced as forage. Some of these grasses are fierce competitors and prevent tree seedlings from establishing, even long after the pastures have been abandoned.

Playa Hermosa, before (left) and after (right) planting 2-m long cuttings of a coastal fig species (Ficus goldmannii).

In 2009, a small non-profit organization, Costas Verdes, was formed to restore coastal forests along degraded shorelines, particularly wildlife refuges. The restoration work was initially challenging; tree seedlings were hard to establish along the coast because of the harsh environment – high temperatures and salinity and lack of freshwater were among the most significant obstacles. Not to mention the invasive cattle forage grasses.

Coastal restoration at Playa Hermosa

Playa Hermosa, a surfing destination on the Central Pacific coast, was among the most heavily deforested project sites. This area, part of a wetland and river estuary, was declared a national wildlife refuge in 1998. By 2009, very little forest had naturally regenerated. This led Costas Verdes to implement a restoration project at this beach. Planting plots were established where invasive grass was removed. In other areas, grasses left intact, as a comparison. It quickly became evident that tree seedlings were outcompeted by the grass. Those in the cleared plots grew better, but they still faced the other coastal habitat challenges.

Some native trees are resistant to hot substrates and high salinity, but these species were not available in tree nurseries, most of which focused on ornamental species. This meant that seedlings needed to come from locally collected and germinated seeds. We realized that this would take time to get going. Tree seedlings under 50 cm rarely survive, even if they have the proper coastal adaptations.

To accelerate the restoration, we decided to use tree cuttings rather than growing seedlings from seed. A colleague suggested Ficus goldmannii as a candidate species, so in 2011 we conducted a planting trial. We planted 225 2-m long cuttings. Of these, 195 (87%) survived their first year. By the second year all 195 survivors had become established and were quickly providing canopy cover and lowering the temperature of the sand.

An established fig stake with a dense canopy. Note the weak, patchy grass below it.

Once fig stakes created some canopy cover, we brought in other tree species – mostly from the coastal tree nursery that we created. Shade from the fig canopy also began to inhibit the invasive grasses, which require high sunlight to photosynthesize efficiently. Reduced competition with these grasses allowed other tree seedling species to survive.

In this instance Ficus cuttings turned out to be useful in promoting restoration. We have since used cuttings for other plots with similar success.

Coastal trees and shrubs growing below established fig cuttings at Playa Hermosa.