Godoong, E. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2026

Liana cutting accelerates tropical forest recovery at a fraction of the cost of tree planting

We urgently need to restore degraded tropical forests to mitigate the climate and biodiversity crises, but how to do so rapidly and cost-effectively remains an open question. Here we provide a long-term, landscape-scale assessment of the effectiveness of enrichment tree planting and liana cutting, the two most common restoration interventions used across many tropical regions. Leveraging one of the worlds largest and longest running forest restoration experiments, we used repeat airborne laser scanning to track the 3D structural recovery of 500 ha of selectively logged rainforest in Borneo. Over an 18-year period, enrichment planting increased mean canopy height by 1.6 m relative to unplanted controls. Remarkably, liana cutting increased canopy height more than four times faster (3.7 m over just 9 years). This recovery was jointly driven by accelerated canopy gap closure, enhanced tree growth, and a 50% reduction in tree mortality. Given that liana cutting is around 10 times cheaper to implement than enrichment planting, our results suggest it provides a cost-effective, scalable solution to accelerate the structural recovery of logged tropical forests.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

Positive effects of tree diversity on tropical forest restoration in a field-scale experiment

Experiments under controlled conditions have established that ecosystem functioning is generally positively related to levels of biodiversity, but it is unclear how widespread these effects are in real-world settings and whether they can be harnessed for ecosystem restoration. We used a long-term, field-scale tropical restoration experiment to test how the diversity of planted trees affected recovery measured across a 500 ha area of selectively logged forest using multiple sources of satellite data. Replanting with species rich mixtures of tree seedlings that had higher phylogenetic and functional diversity accelerated restoration rates. Our results are consistent with a positive relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in the lowland dipterocarp rainforests of SE Asia and demonstrate that using diverse mixtures of species can enhance initial recovery after logging.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

Does forest heterogeneity affect mean throughfall for regenerating secondary forests on Borneo?

Tropical landscape regeneration affects hydrological ecosystem functioning by regulating the amount of water that reaches the soil surface and changing soil infiltration rates. This affects the recharge and storage of water in the soil and streamflow responses. Therefore, it is important to assess how the fraction of rainfall that reaches the forest floor changes as secondary forests mature, and how forest structure affects throughfall via changes in storage capacity and evapotranspiration. Therefore, we monitored throughfall for twelve regenerating, logged-over forest plots in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo over a 7-month period and tested if inclusion of measures of forest heterogeneity improved the prediction of throughfall as a fraction of precipitation. On average across all plots, throughfall was 84% of precipitation, but was lower (as low as 74%) in plots with a longer recovery time since logging. There was a significant relationship between throughfall and tree density and basal area, as well as the Shannon Diversity Index and the coefficient of variation of the diameter at breast height, although species and structural diversity measures (Shannon Index and the coefficient of variation) did not improve model performance substantially. The overall best performing model was a linear regression with tree density. There was no relation between LiDAR-derived Top of Canopy (TCH) and mean throughfall, suggesting that this remotely sensed proxy of canopy height is not needed to estimate throughfall and more in-depth analysis of other LiDAR-products such as point clouds may be required. Our results imply that estimating throughfall in this forest type can be reliably achieved using tree density, and that this is not substantially affected by species diversity or structural heterogeneity variables, at least in the context of logged and regenerating forests in Sabah. Graphical abstract O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=137 SRC="FIGDIR/small/500051v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (38K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@e7b11borg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@11c923dorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@c4f3c6org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@607ab8_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG Forest of a similar size or height can have a different structure. In this study we investigate if diversity also affects the amount of throughfall for plots across a disturbance gradient. C_FIG

ecology↗