Díaz-García Juan Manuel, López-Barrera Fabiola, Pineda Eduardo, Toledo-Aceves Tarin, Andresen Ellen
Red de Ecología Funcional, Instituto de Ecología, A. C., Xalapa, Veracruz, México.
Red de Biología y Conservación de Vertebrados, Instituto de Ecología, A. C., Xalapa, Veracruz, México.
PLoS One. 2020 Nov 10;15(11):e0242020. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242020. eCollection 2020.
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.
为了减轻生物多样性丧失和生态系统退化，热带森林恢复倡议在全球范围内越来越频繁。然而，对于主动恢复策略还是被动恢复策略在恢复生物多样性方面更成功，几乎没有达成共识，因为很少有研究进行充分的比较。此外，与植物研究相比，关于动物对恢复的反应的研究很少，而且那些评估动物恢复情况的研究通常只关注单一分类群，限制了结果的普遍性。我们基于两栖动物、蚂蚁和蜣螂这三个动物分类群的反应，评估了主动（本地混交林种植园）和被动（自然恢复）热带云雾林恢复策略的成功性。我们比较了这三个分类群在一片有23年历史的主动恢复森林、一片有23年历史的被动恢复森林、一个养牛场和一片成熟森林中的群落属性，重点关注森林特化物种。我们还评估了动物恢复与环境变量之间的关系。对于所有分类群，我们发现在主动和被动恢复地点，物种丰富度和组成的恢复情况相似。然而，通过主动恢复，森林特化物种的恢复得到了增强。对于两片正在恢复的森林，由于通才物种被森林特化物种取代，所有动物类群的物种组成与参考生态系统的相似度为60%-70%。动物群落的恢复主要与树冠层和落叶层覆盖有关。我们建议采用本地树种混交种植园进行主动恢复，并尽可能选择靠近成熟森林的地点，以加速热带云雾林生物多样性的恢复。由于主动恢复比被动恢复成本更高，两种策略可以在景观层面以互补的方式使用，以弥补高昂的实施成本。
