Hall quoted on rapid recovery of secondary tropical forests after deforestation
How fast tropical forests recover after deforestation has major consequences for climate change mitigation. A team including Smithsonian scientists discovered that some secondary tropical forests recover biomass quickly: half of the forests in the study attained 90 percent of old-growth forest levels in 66 years or less. Conservation planners can use their resulting biomass-recovery map for Latin America to prioritize conservation efforts.
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"Collaborations like the one illustrated here by the 2ndFor Network, in which site-based monitoring and manipulations allow us to test mechanistic hypotheses related to forest development, and large-scale analysis across sites allow for robust synthesis, are critically important in the era of global change," said Jefferson Hall, STRI staff scientist and director of the Agua Salud Project in the Panama Canal Watershed.