Assembling a late-successional lichen community by long-distance dispersal: Lessons for restoration

The results of restoration efforts have been characterized as notoriously unpredictable. Many variables impact the trajectory of communities towards recovery, and ecological theory that takes traits, habitat configuration, and scale into account, can improve models. However, the most important questions regarding the predictability of species community restoration may be related to stochasticity. We investigated the assembly of a cyanolichen community in a chronosequence consisting of 88 new forest patches (30-140+ years old) comprising today 0.4% of a 170 km2 former treeless heathland area in south-western Norway. Two complete inventories were carried out 12 years apart, and we (1) tested inferences on colonization status and recovery time based on the first inventory only, (2) investigated the recovery of the lichen community by changes in species richness, species density, and composition at three different spatial scales, and (3) discussed how dispersal capacity and stochasticity af..., , , # Assembling a late-successional lichen community by long-distance dispersal: lessons for restoration.

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q83bk3jsz](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q83bk3jsz)

## Description of the data and file structure

### Files and variables

#### File: Data\_file\_species\_occurrences.xlsx

**Description:** All the data are in “Ark1” (sheet 1).

##### Variables

* Species acronyms are based on 4 four first letters of genus + 4 first letters of species name.

1=first inventory, 2= second inventory.

Numbers in species columns are species occurrences, i.e. number of habitat units where the species were present at a site

Old forest sites with an estimated age between 140 and 200 years are given the minimum age of 140 years.