Passive restoration in Araucaria Forest: useful ecological indicators in monitoring successional advancement in exotic tree plantation landscapes

Abstract

Monitoring successional advancement is a complex field involving a constant search for applied ecological indicators which facilitate monitoring of secondary forests for both active and passive restoration. In this study, the authors investigate the successional advancement of floristics and tree structure within Araucaria Forest (AF) fragments under passive restoration in a context where exotic tree plantations (mainly Pinus L. genus) dominate the landscape. The ecological indicators used were floristic dissimilarity (β-diversity inferences), indicator species, ecological groups of species, basal area, and species abundance distribution (SAD) models (α-diversity inferences). A total of 182 tree species belonging to 91 genera and 43 botanical families were identified. A high β diversity was verified for which each site has indicator species (for the locations CD-Dicksonia sellowiana; CO-Cryptocarya aschersoniana; and PG-Pinus taeda), where pioneer species contributed to much of the abundance. Different SAD models are useful for describing passive restoration sites in exotic tree plantation landscapes, namely Lognormal, Mandelbrot, and Zipf. SAD models together with basal area, taxonomic group (e.g. Myrtaceae assemblage), and tree abundance in ecological groups are strategic ecological indicators for monitoring successional advancement in AF.

Linguistic laws in biology

“…(For a more comprehensive bibliography on linguistic laws in biology, see: https://cqllab.upc.edu/biblio/laws/) Vocal communication [42] Gestural communication [20] Intra-population abundance distribution [28] Species abundance distributions [29] Disease spread [30] Zipf-Mandelbrot law. This is a refinement of Zipf's rankfrequency law by Mandelbrot [109] that consists of introducing an additional parameter b.…”

“…Biologists have tested for patterns consistent with linguistic laws among diverse taxa and different levels of biological organisation -molecular [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], organismal [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] and ecological [28][29][30][31] (see Table 1). This work necessitates more general formulations of these laws, which originally were framed in specific linguistic constructs.…”

Mine completion criteria defined by best-practice: A global meta-analysis and Western Australian case studies

“…Mine completion criteria defined by best-practice: A global meta-analysis and Western Australian case studies. Journal of Environmental Management, 282, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.111912 make timely decisions (Lacy et al 2008;Stedille et al 2020). When a risk of non-compliance is detected, interim completion criteria based on trajectory may act as 'trigger levels' (Nichols et al 2005) to determine the need and extent of rehabilitation rework, i.e.…”

“…Leading indicators of vegetation rehabilitation criteria may include microbes (Blanchette et al 2016); Na, Al, pH (Di Carlo et al 2020); legume density, topsoil cover, ripping depth (Grant 2006b) and lines (Ludwig et al 2003); tree height and spacing of trees at planting (Koch & Ward 2005); species composition (Ngugi et al 2015) and diversity (Nichols et al 2005) in the seed mix; species abundance distribution and taxonomy group (Stedille et al 2020). Notably, orchids may signal mycorrhizal fungi recovery (Collins et al 2005), which, in turn, can be used as indicators for plant-nutrient relations (Ludwig et al 2003).…”