Efficiency of different planted forests in recovering biodiversity and ecological interactions in Brazilian Amazon

• The forest conversion to pastures changes the biodiversity of ants and plants.
• We investigate the restoring of biodiversity and interactions on reforestations.
• Network metrics was useful tool to investigate the recovering of biodiversity.
• Any of the studied biodiversity parameter differs from natural succession forests.

In tropical forests, several reforestation programs have been created to recover biological diversity in deforested environments. However, most of these studies have focused on the loss of species and ignored the loss of ecological interactions and ecosystem services that these species provide in their natural environment. Here, we assess how reforestation (including both native and exotic species) and the distance from the forest matrix could recover the following parameters: richness, composition, and ant–plant interactions in the southern Brazilian Amazon. For this, we collected data in five different agroforestry landscapes: primary and secondary forests, reforestations of teak and fig, and pasture. In general, we observed that the distance from the forest matrix was not an important factor for the recovery of ant–plant interactions at the scale of this study. Ant–plant interactions were more specialized in the pasture, possibly due to the low richness and high dominance in pastures, which generates a high ant–plant dependency. Moreover, none of the strategies employed for the recovery of diversity (teak and fig reforestation) increased the recovery rate of the studied parameters: richness, composition, and the patterns of ant–plant interactions, when compared to primary forests. These results indicate that regardless of species richness and composition, secondary forests and reforestation lands are functionally different from pastures. In conclusion, our results represent a valuable tool to conservation planners, mainly because we show that secondary forests created by natural regeneration can be an efficient and economical method for restoring the disruption of ant–plant interactions in tropical forests.