Centennial recovery of recent human-disturbed forests

International commitments to restore degraded forests 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 at least 150 years for ecosystem attributes like nitrogen stocks or species similarity and projected that difference to remain for up to 218 (38-745) or 494 (92-2,039) years, respectively. These conservative recovery metrics, however, still fail to capture the complexity of forest ecosystems, suggesting longer recovery timescales. Global restoration strategies have now the opportunity to engage in planning for a restored world that incorporates ecologically meaningful centennial implementation timescales and monitor..., Database construction
We collected data from 16,873 plots from 125 chronosequences of forest ecosystems recovering for 50 to 295 years in 110 published primary studies. From these 125 chronosequences, we extracted 634 recovery trajectories of quantitative measures of ecosystem attributes along time, related to the six most widely included recovery metrics with enough representation to be statistically meaningful. These included biodiversity metrics (organism abundance, species diversity, and species similarity) and biogeochemical functioning metrics (carbon cycling, nitrogen stock, and phosphorus stock). We also extracted factors related to the context of where recovery and restoration happened and included the restoration strategy (passive and active), the disturbance type [agriculture (including land recovering from cultivation, grazing or combinations of both), logging and mining], the latitude, and the climatic condition (i.e., aridity index).
The trajectories related to organism a..., , # 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 two .csv data files:

* dataset_forest_recovery_metaanalysis.csv: dataset needed to run all the previous and new analysis of this study, updated after the review process.
* dataset_forest_recovery_metaanalysis_posneg.csv: dataset needed to run a sensitivity analysis to separately model the recovery of trajectories that had starting points over 100% ..., , **Changes after Jul 30, 2024:**

**16-oct-2024:** Changes done to meet the suggestions of the revision process.

* Updated \"dataset_forest_recovery_metaanalysis.csv\": Corrected values in column \"y\", \"age\", \"age1_log\" and \"age_sqrt\" for the category \"Morisita-Horn\" of the variable \"metric_type\".
* Updated \"02_analysis_resub_clean.R\": script updated to include new analyses suggested by the reviewers, mainly including the following:

a) a sensitivity analysis to separately model the recovery of trajectories that had starting points over 100% recovery completeness from those with starting points below 100%

b) another sensitivity analysis to model all the recovery estimations after removing 34% of studies in which the reference forest was the last point in the chronosequence over 100 years, rather than an old growth forest

c)  new models to test the effect of latitude on all the recovery estimations
* New file added \"dataset_forest_recovery_metaanalysis_posneg.csv\": da...