Differing agents of physical damage to artificial seedlings in remnant and restored forests

We tested the importance of physical damage to seedlings as a bottleneck to natural regeneration in restored tropical forest using an artificial seedling experiment. After one year more artificial seedlings had been damaged in restored forests (17.6 ± 2.6% SE) compared to remnant forests (12.7 ± 1.1% SE), primarily due to greater frequency of woody debris falling from planted trees. Vertebrate damage was more common in remnant forests.

, Artificial seedling experiment
We placed 1024 artificial seedling models in the eight restored plots and five remnant forests in early May 2022. In most locations, we placed a total of 64 artificial seedlings (one replicate), except for one remnant forest area where we placed 256 seedlings in four replicates of 64 each that were separated by a minimum of 17 m. Within each replicate, artificial seedlings were distributed in four groups of 16 with ≥ 10 m separation. Each group of seedlings was distributed in an X pattern with ≥ 2 m between each artificial seedling (Figure S1) and minor location adjustments to accommodate the presence of obstacles such as large trees.
Each artificial seedling consisted of two 18-cm long × 0.5-cm diameter plastic straws following the design of Clark and Clark (1989) and Rosin et al. (2017), and painted pink or yellow to facilitate observation in the field. The straws were stapled in a \"T\" shape and attached to a 13-cm \"root\" wire using a plastic cable tie a..., , # Data from: Differing agents of physical damage to artificial seedlings in remnant and restored forests

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cz8w9gjbb](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cz8w9gjbb)

## Description of the data

Results from a year-long artificial seedling experiment in restored forests (\"plantations\") and reference remnant forests (8 replicates for each habitat type, 64 artificial seedlings in each replicate).

**Date last modified:** 17 December 2024

### Files and variables

**File:** artificial_seedling_data_2023-05-22.csv

**Description:** Outcomes from year long artificial experiment. Each row represents the status of a single artificial seedling at a particular timepoint. Note that for analysis, only the final outcomes (May 2023, Monitoreo = 9) were used.

##### Variables

* date: date of data collection in format YYYY-MM-DD. 
* Monitoreo: numeric variable indicating the round of monitoring. Values are 1-9.
* Trt: categorical variable indicating the treatment (habitat type)...