Abstract
The restoration of degraded forests to enhance biodiversity, ecosystem services, as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation is now a major priority in cities around the world. This study evaluated the success of the Buffelsdraai Landfill Site Community Reforestation Project in Durban, South Africa, by assessing ecological attributes. Measures of plant richness, diversity, vegetation structure, invasive alien plants (IAPs) and ecological processes were contrasted across a chronosequence of habitats under restoration (0-year-old, 3-year-old and 5-year-old) and compared with a reference forest habitat (remnant natural forest). Native tree species recruitment and vegetation structure increased with restoration age. Ecological processes, represented by the composition of pollination and seed dispersal traits in all of the habitats under restoration, were similar to the reference habitat. However, low tree density and an increase in IAP cover with an increase in restoration age were identified as threats to reforestation success. We recommend enrichment planting and an effective IAP management strategy to promote more rapid habitat restoration while reducing site maintenance costs. Enrichment planting should not only focus on increasing tree species density and richness, but also on the inclusion of species with missing pollination and seed dispersal categories.
Highlights
Continuous environmental degradation, presently occurring at alarming rates around the world, has motivated restoration efforts that aim to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and to ensure continued provision of ecosystem services [1,2]
Species accumulation curves based on abundance-based coverage estimator (ACE) and Chao1 showed that increased sampling would have revealed more species (Figure S1)
59 tree species were recorded in habitats under restoration, of which 49 species were shared with the reference habitat (Table S1)
Summary
Continuous environmental degradation, presently occurring at alarming rates around the world, has motivated restoration efforts that aim to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and to ensure continued provision of ecosystem services [1,2]. Forests 2017, 8, 255 and resilient cities, governments are investing in the restoration of natural capital to improve human well-being [3]. An important objective of restoration initiatives is to create an ecosystem that is self-sustaining and resilient to disturbance [5]. This can be achieved by creating an ecosystem that is closer or more similar to the former natural habitat (commonly labelled ‘reference habitat’) in terms of plant diversity, plant traits and functional group diversity [6,7]. Self-sustaining and resilient forest ecosystems are characterized by a species-rich and multi-layered vegetation structure with key ecological processes such as litter accumulation, pollination and seed dispersal [8,9]. Multi-layered vegetation structure protects the forest from natural hazards [8] such as invasive alien plant (IAP) invasion [11]
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