DOI: 10.5061/dryad.q83bk3jsz
title: Data from: Assembling a late-successional lichen community by long-distance dispersal: Lessons for restoration

description: The results of restoration efforts have been characterized as notoriously
 unpredictable. Many variables impact the trajectory of communities towards
 recovery, and ecological theory that takes traits, habitat configuration,
 and scale into account, can improve models. However, the most important
 questions regarding the predictability of species community restoration
 may be related to stochasticity. We investigated the assembly of a
 cyanolichen community in a chronosequence consisting of 88 new forest
 patches (30-140+ years old) comprising today 0.4% of a 170 km2 former
 treeless heathland area in south-western Norway. Two complete inventories
 were carried out 12 years apart, and we (1) tested inferences on
 colonization status and recovery time based on the first inventory only,
 (2) investigated the recovery of the lichen community by changes in
 species richness, species density, and composition at three different
 spatial scales, and (3) discussed how dispersal capacity and stochasticity
 affect community recovery in general. Colonization of sites by lichen
 species exceeded extinctions in young sites but not in old sites, and in
 the second inventory, the richness of species weighed by occurrences no
 longer differed significantly between young and old sites at landscape
 scale. However, the differences between old and young sites depended on
 the spatial scale and method of measurement. In accordance with inferences
 based only on the first inventory, colonization and extinction dynamics
 indicated that recovery of species richness in our study system will take
 90-120 years at the landscape scale, whereas recovery of species
 composition was difficult to determine due to idiosyncratic development
 among sites. Synthesis and applications. Using species composition as a
 template for the evaluation of restoration recovery in systems with a high
 degree of stochastic colonization and extinction is problematic,
 particularly at finer scales. Ideally, comparisons of restoration and
 reference communities should therefore be at large enough spatial scale to
 cancel out the major effects of stochasticity at finer scales.
 Furthermore, we suggest that a complete recovery of species numbers may
 not be needed as an indicator of restoration success if species richness
 measurements indicate that communities are en route to recovery.
description: # Assembling a late-successional lichen community by long-distance
 dispersal: lessons for restoration.
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q83bk3jsz](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q83bk3jsz) ## Description of the data and file structure ### Files and variables #### File: Data\_file\_species\_occurrences.xlsx **Description:** All the data are in “Ark1” (sheet 1). ##### Variables * Species acronyms are based on 4 four first letters of genus + 4 first letters of species name. 1=first inventory, 2= second inventory. Numbers in species columns are species occurrences, i.e. number of habitat units where the species were present at a site Old forest sites with an estimated age between 140 and 200 years are given the minimum age of 140 years.