Restoration opportunities beyond highly degraded tropical forests: insights from India’s Western Ghats

Tropical rainforest remnants in human-modified landscapes exhibit varying levels of degradation, from highly degraded open-canopied and invasive plant-invaded habitats to closed-canopy forests that appear structurally intact. The former are frequently identified as being in a state of arrested recovery, and targeted for restoration, but restoration needs and opportunities in the latter remain underexplored. Using tree and seedling data from 105 plots spanning a canopy cover gradient in rainforest fragments and 19 plots in relatively intact “reference” rainforests in India’s Western Ghats mountains, we show that the floristic composition, conservation significance, and carbon stocks of closed-canopy fragments (CC) more closely resemble open-canopy fragments (OC) than reference rainforests (RR). For example, densities of old-growth forest species, endemic/threatened species, and carbon stocks, increased from 15%, 28%, and 22% of reference values in OC to 32%, 46%, and 35% in CC, respectiv..., , , # Restoration opportunities beyond highly degraded tropical forests: insights from India’s Western Ghats

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8kprr4xvb](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8kprr4xvb)

This document describes the data and scripts associated with Osuri et al. 2024: Restoration opportunities beyond highly degraded tropical forests: insights from India’s Western Ghats

The upload contains three data files and four R scripts.

## Description of the data and file structure

1\. **Osuri_tree_data.csv** contains data from 132 tree (GBH >=30 cm) inventory plots (20m x 20m) in rainforest fragments and reference rainforests. 124 plots were analyzed, while 8 plots lacking canopy cover data were excluded. The data columns are:

DateTime: Date/timestamp

Treatment: Forest fragmentation status -- Fragment OR Benchmark (reference)

Site_ID: Unique site code for each plot

Species_name: Species name as recorded

Height: Tree height (m)

GBH1: Girth at breast height (cm) of single-stemmed trees
...