Vegetation restoration is associated with increasing forest width

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Monitoring and assessment reveal important information about restoration areas and can also be useful for understanding ecological processes such as succession and species-area relationships. Herein, we investigated whether the time after restoration determines the similarity between restoration forests and reference ecosystems, and whether the age and width of the forest as well as the surrounding forest cover have an influence on forest restoration. The tree stratum, seed rain, and regenerating stratum were monitored in a reference ecosystem and four 10-year and 20-year-old restoration forests of different widths in southeastern Brazil. We verified that both 10- and 20-year-old restoration forests were like the reference ecosystem in the species richness, diversity, number of individuals, and functional groups of the tree stratum and seed rain. However, the floristic composition of the three strata evaluated plus the number of regenerating plants were lower in the restoration forests than in the reference ecosystem, which may be due to the agricultural matrix where the restoration forests were inserted. We also found that most of the ecological indicators were associated with increasing forest width meaning that wider strips can recover more vegetation attributes. The study indicates that various indicators can be recovered within a decade of active restoration (seedling planting) in the tropics. The regenerating stratum however may require more than two decades to recover. As the restoration was associated with increasing forest width, restoration practitioners should restore wider areas so that more biological groups can be recovered.