Local habitat characteristics influence abundance and community structure of rodents in a regenerating Lulanda reserved forest, southern Tanzania

Abstract

Restoration of degraded natural areas to enhance species conservation is widely gaining pace; however, effort assessing restoration impact on the animal community particularly in restored African forests is still rare. We used a capture‐mark‐recapture method to trap rodents and to assess effect of restoration and ecological covariates on the rodent abundance and community structure in Lulanda Forest Reserve, southern Tanzania, 20 years after restoration. We found five species in the restored corridor and three in the natural fragments, with Grammomys dolichurus the most abundant in the former and Praomys delectorum in the latter forest type. Species diversity was highest in the restored corridor and lowest in the natural forest, supporting earlier studies in this forest reserve. Further, the rodent communities were broadly similar by >55% between studied sites but showed strong association with local habitat characteristics in the restored corridor, suggesting the importance of restoration on reassembling the small‐mammal communities. Our regression models revealed number of saplings and shrub cover were the strongest predictors of the rodent abundance across the study sites. Despite the rodent colonization of the secondary forest, we found most measured biophysical properties significantly lower in the restored corridor, suggesting that the secondary forest is still far from attaining conditions of the old‐growth natural fragment at its second decade of succession. Future monitoring to see how other animal taxa recolonize these forests will increase our knowledge on how the animal communities assemble in the restored habitats following disturbance threats.