Plant Functional Traits and Species Selection in Tropical Forest Restoration

Abstract

Restoration practitioners are faced with many decisions when restoring tropical forests in abandoned pastures. One of the most important decisions is selecting combinations of species to plant that can mitigate the many barriers seedlings face to maximize seedling establishment and growth. To aid in species selection, there is an increasing shift in using plant functional traits, yet there is still progress to be made in understanding how traits respond to barriers present during the early stages of seedling establishment. Here, I present an example of a trait–barrier relationship from our recent publication in the Journal of Applied Ecology and discuss how using functional traits can help develop tailored combinations of species for specific site conditions.