Diverse and larger tree islands promote native tree diversity in oil palm landscapes

Oil palm plantations replace diverse tropical forests with monocultures, but restoration can bring biodiversity and ecosystem services back to these highly modified landscapes. Planting areas of forest (“tree islands ”) can provide seeds and microclimates favorable to the natural regeneration of native trees. Paterno et al. planted tree islands of different sizes and levels of diversity to determine how these management factors affected natural regeneration success. Larger and more diverse plantings led to greater recruited tree diversity in terms of, not just species, but also functional traits and lineages. These local factors played a greater role than the distance to forest patches or density of native trees in the landscape.