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Abstract:
On the African continent, the population is expected to expand fourfold in the next
century, which will increasingly impact the global carbon cycle and biodiversity conservation.
Therefore, it is of vital importance to understand how carbon stocks and
community assembly recover after slash-and-
burn
events in tropical second growth
forests. We inventoried a chronosequence of 15 1-ha
plots in lowland tropical forest
of the central Congo Basin and evaluated changes in aboveground and soil organic
carbon stocks and in tree species diversity, functional composition, and community-weighted
functional traits with succession. We aimed to track long-term
recovery
trajectories of species and carbon stocks in secondary forests, comparing 5 to
200 + year old secondary forest with reference primary forest. Along the successional
gradient, the functional composition followed a trajectory from resource acquisition
to resource conservation, except for nitrogen-related
leaf traits. Despite a
fast, initial recovery of species diversity and functional composition, there were still
important structural and carbon stock differences between old growth secondary
and pristine forest, which suggests that a full recovery of secondary forests might
take much longer than currently shown. As such, the aboveground carbon stocks of
200 + year old forest were only 57% of those in the pristine reference forest, which
suggests a slow recovery of aboveground carbon stocks, although more research is
needed to confirm this observation. The results of this study highlight the need for
more in-depth
studies on forest recovery in Central Africa, to gain insight into the processes that control biodiversity and carbon stock recovery.
