摘要：In tropical areas with high levels of fragmentation due to agricultural use, forest fragments play animportant role for biodiversity conservation at the landscape scale. But these fragments are subjectto recurrent disturbances, which lead to arrested succession and loss of functional groups. In suchcases, active restoration, such as enrichment planting, could facilitate recovery. We studied enrichment planting methods to restore tropical forest fragments in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, and weevaluated the costs to implement them in the field. We planted four later successional tree speciesas seeds, small seedlings, and large seedlings in three remnants embedded in a landscapedominated by sugarcane plantations. Overall, survival of seedlings was low using all methodsdue to a severe drought during the study period, and there were no differences in seedling survivalor growth across the three study sites. Direct seeding was the least expensive technique but wassuccessful only for one large-seeded species, Hymenaea courbaril. Large seedlings survived betterthan did small seedlings, for all four species, suggesting that the additional cost of growing largeseedlings is warranted to enhance success. Our results highlight that a combination of plantingmethods at species level is likely to increase restoration success.
