Data from: Incomplete recovery of tree community composition and rare species after 120 years of tropical forest succession in Panama

Determining how fully tropical forests regenerating on abandoned land
recover characteristics of old-growth forests is increasingly important
for understanding their role in conserving rare species and maintaining
ecosystem services. Despite this, our understanding of forest structure
and community composition recovery throughout succession is incomplete, as
many tropical chronosequences do not extend beyond the first 50 years of
succession. Here, we examined trajectories of forest recovery across eight
1-hectare plots in middle and later stages of forest succession (40 – 120
years) and five 1-hectare old-growth plots, in the Barro Colorado Nature
Monument (BCNM), Panama. We first verified that forest age had a greater
effect than edaphic or topographic variation on forest structure,
diversity and composition and then corroborated results from smaller plots
censused 20 years previously. Tree species diversity (but not species
richness) and forest structure had fully recovered to old-growth levels by
40 and 90 years, respectively. However, rare species were missing, and
old-growth specialists were in low abundance, in the mid- and late
secondary forest plots, leading to incomplete recovery of species
composition even by 120 years into succession. We also found evidence that
dominance early in succession by a long-lived pioneer led to altered
forest structure and delayed recovery of species diversity and composition
well past a century after land abandonment. Our results illustrate the
critical importance of old-growth and old secondary forests for
biodiversity conservation, given that recovery of community composition
may take several centuries, particularly when a long-lived pioneer
dominates in early succession.