DOI: 10.5061/dryad.sh0v5
title: Data from: Plantings accelerate restoration of tropical forest but assembly mechanisms appear insensitive to initial composition

description: 1. Phylogenetic and trait-based approaches to community ecology are
 increasingly being used to test for nonrandom community assembly and are
 now being applied to assessments of habitat restoration. A critical
 question for the restoration of tropical forests is how plantings
 influence the recruitment of new species, and specifically the
 phylogenetic and functional diversity of restored habitats. 2. We examined
 8 years (2006-2014) of tropical forest recruitment in two restoration
 planting compositions (12 animal-dispersed and 12 wind-dispersed tree
 species) and a control (no plantings) in 24 plots, Los Tuxtlas, Mexico.
 Specifically, we assessed the influence of plantings on newly arriving
 individuals’ phylogenetic, functional, taxonomic diversity, abundance and
 the change of these measures during early succession. 3. The recruiting
 individuals’ phylogenetic, functional, taxonomic diversity and abundance
 increased through succession. Both animal-dispersed plantings and
 wind-dispersed plantings appeared to accelerate forest succession more
 than controls (natural succession), and the recruits’ diversities in the
 animal-dispersed plantings were marginally higher after 8 years. We did
 not find any difference in recruiting individuals’ phylogenetic and
 functional dispersion (measured as standardized effect sizes) in any given
 year or when measured as turnover between successive pairs of years
 between planting composition and the control plots. 4. Recruiting
 individuals were phylogenetically clustered during early forest
 restoration regardless of treatment. At the same time, the recruits
 transitioned from appearing to be constructed randomly to being clustered
 based on functional traits, which suggests the increase of recruits’
 functional similarity during early succession. 5. Synthesis and
 applications. The plantings accelerated the increase of recruiting
 individuals’ phylogenetic, functional, taxonomic diversity and abundance
 during early succession, although planting treatment did not appear to
 alter community assembly mechanisms of recruiting individuals. Our
 findings support restoration plantings by showing that planting trees with
 animal dispersal syndromes could accelerate forest restoration more than
 unassisted forest regeneration. Further, communities appeared to be
 phylogenetically and functionally clustered during early succession
 regardless of initial planted composition. Thus, while overall diversity
 increased with plantings, if a restoration goal is to maximize
 phylogenetic or functional dispersion, the planting composition tested did
 not provide means to achieve this goal, at least during early
 succession.19-Jun-2017
description: Maximum likelihood
 treeMolecular phylogeny
 estimated from maximum likelihoodLi et al. 2017 ML
 tree.nwkTrait
 dataTrait data for species
 observed in restoration plotsLi et al. 2017 Trait
 data.xlsxPlot composition
 -including planted individualsLi et al. 2017 Recruitment data
 by plots (with transplanted
 species).xlsxPlot composition
 -EXCLUDING planted individualsLi et al. 2017 Recruitment data
 by plots.xlsx