Degree of intervention affects interannual and within-plot heterogeneity of seed arrival in tropical forest restoration

1. In degraded tropical landscapes lack of seed dispersal can strongly limit recovery, and restoration interventions can overcome this barrier by attracting dispersers. However, seed dispersal patterns are typically studied over short time periods, thus the influences of temporal and spatial variability on seed arrival cannot be teased apart.

2. Choice of management approach can have important implications for restoration-mediated community reassembly. Accordingly, we used a 3.5-year record of seed deposition in premontane tropical wet forest in southern Costa Rica to examine how seed arrival differed between passive (natural regeneration) and active (applied nucleation, plantation) restoration after a decade of recovery, compared to remnant forest. We investigated: (1) how restoration treatments affected seed deposition rates and community composition; (2) how within-plot heterogeneity of animal-dispersed seed deposition varied by intervention; and (3) how interannual variation infl...