Abstract
Choosing species for reforestation programs or community forestry in species‐rich tropical rainforest ecosystems is a complex task. Reforestation objectives, social preferences, and ecological attributes must be balanced to achieve landscape restoration, timber production, or community forestry objectives. Here we develop a method to make better species choices for reforestation programs with native species when limited silvicultural information is available. We conducted community surveys to determine social preference of tree species and inferred their ecological suitability for open‐field plantations from growth rates and frequency in forest plots at different successional stages. Several species, for which silvicultural data was available, were correctly classified as promising or unsuitable for open‐field reforestation. Notably, we found a strong negative correlation between ecological suitability indicators and socioeconomic preference ranks. Only a single outlier species ranked very high in both categories. This result highlights the difficulty of finding suitable native species for community forestry and offers an explanation why reforestation efforts with native species often fail. We concluded that the approach should be a useful first screening of species‐rich forest communities for potential reforestation species. Our results also support the view that species‐rich tropical rainforests are not an easily renewable natural resource in a sense that secondary forests will not provide an equivalent resource value to local communities.
Highlights
Government reforestation and community forestry programs are important activities to offset the results of many decades of deforestation, which has left many countries and jurisdictions with an impoverished and degraded land base (Hansen et al 2013)
Loss of tropical forest cover by geographic regions is most severe in Southeast Asia (37% of total area remaining in 2005), followed by Central America and Central Africa with 45%, and the Amazon basin with 56% forest cover remaining (FAO 2005)
Primary forest in Southeast Asia and Central America are most affected with 16% and 18% original forest cover remaining intact, respectively (FAO 2005)
Summary
Government reforestation and community forestry programs are important activities to offset the results of many decades of deforestation, which has left many countries and jurisdictions with an impoverished and degraded land base (Hansen et al 2013). Loss of tropical forest cover by geographic regions is most severe in Southeast Asia (37% of total area remaining in 2005), followed by Central America and Central Africa with 45%, and the Amazon basin with 56% forest cover remaining (FAO 2005). Primary forest in Southeast Asia and Central America are most affected with 16% and 18% original forest cover remaining intact, respectively (FAO 2005). In Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia had less than 6% primary forest cover left in 2005 (FAO 2005). In these countries, land degradation, erosion, water supply concerns, and landslides have often become common problems (Sidle et al 2006). With tropical cyclones making landfall five to seven times a year in the Philippines, disasters are common with 35.4 per million fatalities reported between 1950 and 2009, the second highest rate worldwide (Forbes and Broadhead 2013)
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