Phylogenetic ecology applied to enrichment planting of tropical native tree species

Enrichment planting within established plantations or secondary forests is a common strategy to enhance forest recovery, given that later successional forest species tend to have low dispersal and limited recruitment into these sites. It is difficult, however, to predict how species of seedlings will perform when planted under different overstory species. The field of phylogenetic ecology offers tools to help guide the selection of seedlings, drawing on the evolutionary conservatism of important functional traits. We evaluated the survival, growth, foliar disease, and herbivory of various native tropical tree seedlings at different evolutionary distances from monospecific stands of trees beneath which they were planted. We expected that seedlings planted under conspecific overstory trees would have low survival and growth and high percent foliar damage (as predicted by the Janzen–Connell Hypothesis), and that seedling performance would improve steadily with phylogenetic distance between seedling and overstory species. We found that seedlings planted under conspecific canopies had lower survivorship, reduced growth, and greater foliar damage than seedlings planted under canopies of different tree species. An overall increase in seedling performance with greater phylogenetic distance between seedling and overstory species was dominated by the contrast in performance between conspecific pairs and seedlings planted beneath extra-familial overstory species; but lack of available congeneric pairing limited inference about interactions among close relatives. Most pathogenic fungi isolated from enrichment-planted seedlings also caused disease when inoculated on the overstory tree species where the seedlings had been planted; this is consistent with overstory trees being an important reservoir of pathogens that affect seedlings. We conclude that enrichment planting with species more distantly related to those that dominate the canopy should enhance seedling’s performance. Closer analysis at the congeneric level is warranted because of expected strong biotic interactions at close phylogenetic distances.

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► We present the novel application of phylogenetic ecology to the field of forest restoration.
► We evaluated phylogenetic distance as an indicator of enrich-planted seedlings performance.
► Seedlings of the same species as the overstory performed poorly.
► The phylogenetic signal of seedling performance was weak beyond conspecifics.