Nutrient limitation in tropical secondary forests following different management practices

Secondary forests now make up more than half of all tropical forests, and constraints on their biomass accumulation will influence the strength of the terrestrial carbon (C) sink in the coming decades. However the variance in secondary tropical forest biomass for a given stand age and climate is high and our understanding of why is limited. We constructed a model of terrestrial C, nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) cycling to examine the influence of disturbance and management practices on nutrient limitation and biomass recovery in secondary tropical forests. The model predicted that N limited the rate of forest recovery in the first few decades following harvest, but that this limitation switched to P approximately 30-40 years after abandonment, consistent with field data on N and P cycling from secondary tropical forest chronosequences. Simulated biomass recovery agreed well with field data of biomass accumulation following harvest (R2=0.80). Model results showed that if all biomass re...