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.

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!

 

 

Little known side of Hong Kong: Conservation and Restoration work at Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden (KFBG)

James and Thibaud Aronson made a stop in Hong Kong recently, and post a report on what’s going on restoration-wise at the 60-year old Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Gardens.

After three weeks in New Zealand – about which we will report in our next two posts – we stopped recently in Hong Kong to visit the Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden (KFBG), which has just celebrated its 60^th anniversary. Most visitors to Hong Kong never leave the city center, which has the second highest concentration of skyscrapers in the world and rivals London and New York for shopping, but also as a global hub for finance, trading, and marketing. But, we were lucky: through our friend Kingsley Dixon we had an introduction to Dr. Gunter Fischer, Head of the Flora Conservation Department at KFBG. Dr. Fischer came to Hong Kong from Austria, 7 years ago, and now oversees the vast – and gorgeous – botanic garden, the herbarium, the genetic and ecology laboratories and the various restoration and native plant recovery programs at the KFBG, which is the result of an exemplary public sector-private sector partnership. Behind the scenes, a key component is the large on-site tree nursery and enormous amounts of effort devoted to seed collecting and plantations of mother plant collections of rare native tree species for seed production. “In a changing world, resilience comes from diversity”, as Gunter so nicely puts it.

Ms. Chung Yick Kwan, an employee of the garden working in the KFBG tree nursery, handling one of the many rare native species propagated here.

Other departments at KFBG include the Sustainable Living and Agriculture, Fauna Conservation, Kadoorie Conservation China, and Education. Activities are devoted to developing and demonstrating sustainable small-scale farming methods for food production in South China, including new methods such as permaculture and traditional Chinese methods that have been lost or abandoned during the Chinese cultural revolution. There is also an extensive rehabilitation program for wild animals, notably many rare and endangered turtles, mammals, and birds that were seized by Hong Kong customs or delivered by animal rescue organizations.

All of these activities stem naturally from the original raison d’être of the organization. When Sir Horace and his brother Lord Lawrence Kadoorie founded the Farm 60 years ago, their goal was to help Chinese immigrants get established as small farmers.

Sir Horace and Lord Lawrence Kadoorie – the founders of KFBG. (Photo: KFBG archives)

Text of one of the guiding principles of the charity work of KFBG in the early 1950s, which is still valid in the 21st century (NB. In the 1950s KFBG was called KAAA, Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association). (Photo: KFBG archives)

To this day, the Kadoorie Foundation is the main funding source of the KFBG. But with vastly greater affluence in Hong Kong today, since the mid-1990s, a decision was made to transform the property into a world-class education and conservation center with a botanic garden at its heart. The conservation work comprises numerous projects in Hong Kong and mainland China but also parts of Southeast Asia, such as poorly explored regions of Laos and Cambodia.

Originally, Hong Kong was covered in tropical and subtropical forest, but it was completely deforested after the British took over in 1841; visitors in the 19^th and early 20^th century called Hong Kong a “barren rock”. As a result of centuries of cultivation with crops such as rice and tea, and ongoing urbanization in combination with more and more exhausted soils, many mountain slopes were left to their fate, completely denuded of any vegetation ongoing soil erosion, and high run-off during the annual monsoon seasons caused landslides and wreaked havoc.

Starting in the 1880s, successive governments undertook massive afforestation programs, as documented by the eminent ecologist Richard Corlett. However, during the World War II Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, most of the recently recovered forests were burned or devastated by harvesting of fuel wood.

After WWII, secondary forests began to recover, but of the 450 native tree species, only ca. 100 regenerated naturally, and the other species carry on sadly towards extinction. Moreover, there are huge problems with introduced grasses, many of which carry fire far better than anyone would like.

Upper area of KFBG’s restoration site devastated by a fire in 2004. (Photo: Dr. Billy Hau)

Thus the challenges for conservation and restoration are enormous. Indeed, the same is true at the regional scale. As Gunter told us, “most of the forests of South China have been trashed”; only tiny fragments of primary forest remain, and very little work on restoration of the original forest is going on. Since he arrived at KFBG, over 6 years ago, Gunter has done remarkable things in the botanic garden portion of the 159 hectare property, located on a steep slope of Tai Mo Shan, the highest point in Hong Kong (957 m or 3140 ft), including the launch of an ambitious restoration program on the recovering wilderness portion of the property that few visitors see. Rather than full coverage, a tree island, or assisted nucleation approach is taken, similar to that used in on-going experiments in Costa Rica, which Leighton Reid posted on last November.

Core area of the 15 hectare (42 acre) experiment restoration site at KFBG, showing tree island plantings of 2015 and 2016, with various soil preparation techniques and tree guards being tested. (Photo : Gunter Fischer)

The focus is largely scientific and conservation-oriented, given that most of the flora of Hong Kong is highly endangered. However, horticulture and arboriculture are as important as ecology here, Gunter assures us – an observation that jives well with the Missouri Botanical Garden’s approach to restoration as well. For example, Gunter and his colleagues not only plant ten thousand trees on average each year, all produced in the experimental KFBG nursery, they also prune and shape the trees they’ve planted to encourage upward growth rather than low shrubby formatting, which is what often happens with many trees after planting.

Structurally pruned Quercus edithiae, a rare canopy tree in South China.

A large proportion of the tree planting budget is devoted to plastic cylinders (tree guards/shelters) to protect tree saplings from barking deer and wild boar, but also from harsh climatic conditions.

Tree guards used to protect seedlings on a ridge from strong desiccating winds.

The KFBG restoration team also makes a big effort to study soil improvement techniques that will compensate for degraded soils and improve survival and early growth of the planted trees. One of the most interesting components of this experimental work concerns the use of Biochar prepared on site, by slowly heating wood in closed containers with almost no air. Much of the wood comes from stems and trunks of intentionally introduced and now invasive fast-growing trees, such as the appropriately named Acacia confusa, that are gradually being removed from the property. This approach to invasive woody weeds has great potential in many parts of the world and should receive a lot more attention and investment.

Invasive trees and those deemed hazardous to human safety are continuously removed and replaced with native species. The wood is used to prepare biochar.

Clearly, KFBG is one of the bright spots of plant and animal conservation, and ecological restoration in Asia today.

Native animals such as this bamboo pit viper (Trimeresurus stejnegeri) are recolonising the restoration site. (Photo: Gunter Fischer)

For more information, see the recent article published by Gunter and his colleague Jinlong Zhang. Also, if you’re travelling to Hong Kong, be sure to stop by. Even if you don’t trek to the higher slopes to see restoration work-in-progress, the Botanic Garden is also full of interesting natural and cultural sights and stories too, such as these elevated pigeon hotels. And how many botanical gardens occasionally have to close a road because a massive python is stretched right across it, digesting a deer for a week!

Dragon boat pigeon hotel on the KFBG grounds.

And there is the museum, theme gardens such as the Gloria Barretto orchid sanctuary, and lush forest gardens that appear to be native forest fragments but in fact are tropical gardens providing an exhilarating experience for thousands of visitors each month just a few miles from downtown Hong Kong.

Montane streamside forest garden with trees covered in epiphytic ferns.

 

 

Tree islands for tropical forest restoration: the outlook is rosy after 10 years

Planting tree islands has many of the benefits of larger plantations, but entails significantly less cost. Karen Holl (University of California, Santa Cruz), Leighton Reid (Missouri Botanical Garden), and Zak Zahawi (American University of Beirut) describe recent findings on tree seedling recruitment in a long-term experiment in southern Costa Rica.

Over the past few years there have been a growing number of commitments at the global, national and regional scale to restore forests because of their importance to conserve biodiversity, sequester carbon, reduce erosion, and provide goods and services to people. For example, Initiative 20×20, led by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, aims to restore 20 million hectares of tropical forest by 2020, an area roughly equivalent to the size of Uruguay or Nebraska.

A common strategy to restore forests is to plant trees. But, the big question is: where will the money come from to plant billions of trees when there are so many pressing needs? As restoration ecologists, we started thinking about how we could most efficiently allocate resources to get the best bang for the buck and restore the largest area of forest.

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 10 years it appears to provide a good balance. Figure modified from Corbin & Holl (2012).

Starting over 10 years ago, we set up a large-scale tropical forest restoration experiment in southern Costa Rica to test two ideas.

First, we tried planting tree “islands”. The idea is to plant 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. In one experimental treatment, we planted tree islands that covered about 20% of 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).

Second, we asked: is it only possible to restore forest near remnant forests or can you restore forest anywhere in the landscape? This is important information to help guide forest restoration efforts. To do this we set up our entire experiment at 13 sites, some of which were mostly surrounded by agricultural land and some of which were adjacent to the largest remaining forests in the region.

Then we monitored establishment of new tree seedlings in our research plots over a decade. We compared the number of seedlings, number of species, and types of species in the restoration plots with those found in the nearby forest to evaluate how well the forest is recovering.

The tree island planting method not only saves money on buying, planting, and maintaining seedlings, but it also results in a more heterogeneous distribution of trees, so it looks more like a natural forest.

Profuse tree seedling and sapling recruitment in the understory between two tree islands in southern Costa Rica.

We counted over 6000 tree seedlings, 88% of which have seeds that are dispersed by animals. On average there were many more tree seedlings in the tree island and plantation treatments than in the natural recovery plots. These results suggests that some tree planting helps the forest to recover faster, but that it is not necessary to plant the whole area with trees. The tree island planting method not only saves money on buying, planting, and maintaining seedlings, but it also results in a more heterogeneous distribution of trees, so it looks more like a natural forest.

Even though there were many tree seedlings in the island and plantation plots, on average there were less seedlings of tree species that have big seeds (>0.5 cm/0.2 inches across) compared to mature, reference forests. It seems that the larger-seeded species that are common in mature forests are much slower to colonize restored sites, likely because they are eaten and dispersed by a small number of larger animals, such trogons and agoutis. Many of those dispersers are less likely to visit early successional forest.

Small frugivores, small seeds. Most of the birds we see in these experimental plots are small-gaped omnivores (e.g., Yellow-bellied Elaenia, Elaenia flavogaster, left), but it usually takes large-gaped species to disperse larger seeds¹. The figure at right shows the maximum fruit size that a bird species with a given gape size was able to consume in a cloud forest in central Costa Rica (modified from Wheelwright (1985)). In our experiment, small seeds were ubiquitous, but large seeds were mostly absent.

We were surprised that the amount of forest cover around the experimental plots had a weak effect on the number of seedlings establishing. In other words, isolated plots had just as many tree seedlings as plots right next to old-growth forests. We think that this is likely due to the fact that there are many trees in the agricultural landscape surrounding our plots; these trees include remnant trees, living fence rows, and riparian corridors. Trees in the landscape can serve an important role in both providing sources of seeds and stepping stones for the movement of seed-dispersing fauna. We anticipate that having forest nearby will be more important in future years as these forests build up greater diversity of rare, large-seeded species. Nonetheless, our results suggest that there are good prospects for restoring forests in many locations in this landscape.

Our key finding is that planting tree islands can be a cost-effective way to restore tropical forests at our study site in Costa Rica, but we hasten to note that the strategy should be tested in other locations, particularly areas with fewer forest elements in the surrounding countryside. Our study also demonstrates that tropical forests can recover some species quickly but it will take many decades, if ever, for forests to fully recover. So, preserving existing rain forests is critical to conserve biodiversity and the services they provide to people.

Diverse tree cover in an agricultural landscape in southern Costa Rica. Remnant trees in pastures, trees along fence rows, and riparian forests provide important sources of flora and fauna to speed up forest recovery.

¹See Melo et al. (2009) for an example to the contrary: small-gaped animals dispersing fairly large fruits and seeds.

This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.