All our scientific research in Reassembly on the recovery of species communities, interactions and ecosystem processes is based on a common design: our ‘chronosequence‘ is a set of 62 plots of different regeneration ages. It includes agricultural plots still in use, secondary forests 0 to over 38 years old, and undisturbed old-growth forests. This “space-time substitution” – studying change over time by actually comparing sites of different ages – is a common approach in ecology. However, the spatial design has to meet many requirements to be able to conclude that our results really represent ‘regeneration time’, such as tests for elevation bias, other econironmental factors or spatial autocorrelation. Now, our important fundamental paper for Reassembly – and proof of concept – has been published in Ecosphere. Sebastian Escobar and a whole team of co-authors have compiled important spatial information from all the plots and put the chronosequence in the context of other studies. We have shown that our design is highly suitable and unbiased for describing tree growth and diversity. The well-resolved chronosequence can therefore help to compare recovery time and stability (resistance and resilience) across different taxa, functions and networks. Important concepts and terms are explained and defined in this key article for our Research Unit, and all basic data needed to interpret the recovery gradient are publicly available with this paper.
