Effects of landscape composition and site land-use intensity on secondary succession in a tropical dry forest

Regenerating forests after agricultural land abandonment are increasingly common in human-modified tropical landscapes. These secondary forests preserve biodiversity and provide multiple ecosystem services, but such important roles depend on their recovery rates, which can be difficult to predict. Recovery is expected to occur faster when landscape composition favors seed dispersal to the regenerating site, and when previous land-use does not significantly reduce propagule bank or future plant growth. Here, we test such expectations for the recovery of a Mexican tropical dry forest during secondary succession. For this purpose, we measured several indicators of landscape composition and site land-use intensity in 30 regenerating sites located along gradients of age of abandonment and amount of surrounding forest. Generalized linear models and redundancy analysis were fitted to test if values of four vegetation properties (aboveground biomass, total and dominant species diversity, and species composition) were indicative of such effects. We found evidence that, as expected, species richness recovers faster in sites surrounded by higher forest cover, while aboveground biomass recovers slower as surrounding pasture cover increases. Species composition was also significantly but poorly explained by the interaction between age of abandonment and the amount of forest cover. Contrary to our expectations, we found weak evidence on the impact of site land-use intensity on all vegetation properties, except on the number of dominant species, which showed higher values in sites with higher land-use intensity. Our findings show that landscape context plays a major role in structuring successional plant communities in this tropical dry region, even stronger than site land-use intensity. This seems to be related to the influence of landscape patterns on dispersal and recruitment limitation, but also on the likelihood of further human disturbances. Therefore, conserving landscape quality is paramount to enhance forest recovery and its contribution to the preservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services.