Long-term recovery of the functional community assembly and carbon pools in an African tropical forest succession

On the African continent, the population is expected to expand fourfold in the next century, which will increasingly impact the global carbon cycle and biodiversity conservation. Therefore, it is of vital importance to understand how carbon stocks and community assembly recover after slash-and-burn events in tropical second-growth forests. We inventoried a chronosequence of 15 1-hectare plots in lowland tropical forest of the central Congo Basin and evaluated changes in aboveground and soil organic carbon stocks and in tree species diversity, functional composition and community-weighted functional traits with succession. We aimed to track long-term recovery trajectories of species and carbon stocks in secondary forests, comparing 5 to 200+ year old secondary forest with reference primary forest. Along the successional gradient, the functional composition followed a trajectory from resource acquisition to resource conservation, except for nitrogen-related leaf traits. Despite a fast ini...