Centennial recovery of recent human-disturbed forests

International commitments are challenging countries to restore their degraded lands, particularly forests. These commitments require global assessments of recovery timescales and trajectories of different forest attributes to inform restoration strategies. We use a meta-chronosequence approach including 125 forest chronosequences to reconstruct the past (c. 300 years), and model future recovery trajectories of forests recovering from agriculture and logging impacts. We found recovering forests significantly differed from undisturbed ones after 150 years and projected that difference to remain for up to 218 or 494 years for ecosystem attributes like nitrogen stocks or species similarity, respectively. These conservative estimates, however, do not capture the complexity of forest ecosystems. A centennial recovery of forests requires strategic, unprecedented planning to deliver a restored world., Database construction
We collected data from 16,873 plots from 125 chronosequences of recovering forest ecosystems in 110 published primary studies. From these chronosequences, we extracted 641 recovery trajectories of quantitative measures of ecosystem attributes along time, related to six recovery metrics (organism abundance, species diversity, species similarity, carbon cycling, nitrogen stock, and phosphorus stock), two restoration strategies (passive and active), three disturbance types [agriculture (including abandoned croplands and pastures), logging and mining], and a climatic metric (i.e., aridity index). From the selected chronosequences, we extracted 641 recovery trajectories, i.e., field-based quantitative measurements of ecosystem integrity repeated through time, reported in tables, figures, and text of the selected studies. Each trajectory included at least two data points, defined as the value of the ecosystem metric at different times since recovery started (hereafter, r..., , # Centennial recovery of recent human-disturbed forests

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.rv15dv4h8](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.rv15dv4h8)

This dataset includes the information compiled in a meta-analysis about global long-term recovery trajectories of forest ecosystems, in terms of their biodiversity (i.e., organism abundance, species diversity, and Morisita-Horn species similarity) and biogeochemical functions (i.e., cycling of carbon, nitrogen stock, and phosphorus stock); and the response ratios computed to estimate the recovery completeness of each of these metrics.

## Description of the data and file structure

Data are provided in a single .csv data file. These are the definitions of all the columns:

Columns related to each selected article in the meta-analysis:

*code*: code given to each selected article in the meta-analysis

*citation*: an abbreviated version of each selected article's citation

Columns related to each forest chronosequence:

*chrono*: number to identify ...