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Predicting forest recovery at landscape scales will aid forest restoration efforts. The first step in successful forest recovery is tree recruitment. Forecasts of tree recruit abundance, derived from the landscape-scale distribution of seed sources (i.e., adult trees), could assist efforts to identify sites with high potential for natural regeneration. However, previous work revealed wide variation in the effect of seed sources on seedling abundance, from positive to no effect. We quantified the relationship between adult tree seed sources and tree recruits and predicted where natural recruitment would occur in a fragmented, tropical, agricultural landscape. We integrated species-specific tree crown maps generated from hyperspectral imagery and property ownership data with field data on the spatial distribution of tree recruits from five species. We then developed hierarchical Bayesian models to predict landscape-scale recruit abundance. Our models revealed that species-specific maps of tree crowns improved recruit abundance predictions. Conspecific crown area had a much stronger impact on recruitment abundance (8.00% increase in recruit abundance when conspecific tree density increases from zero to one tree; 95% credible interval (CI): 0.80% to 11.57%) than heterospecific crown area (0.03% increase with the addition of a single heterospecific tree, 95% CI: −0.60% to 0.68%). Individual property ownership was also an important predictor of recruit abundance: The best performing model had varying effects of conspecific and heterospecific crown area on recruit abundance, depending on individual property ownership. We demonstrate how novel remote sensing approaches and cadastral data can be used to generate high-resolution and landscape-level maps of tree recruit abundance. Spatial models parameterized with field, cadastral, and remote sensing data are poised to assist decision support for forest landscape restoration.

Earth system models must predict forest responses to global change in order to simulate future global climate, hydrology, and ecosystem dynamics. These models are increasingly adopting vegetation demographic approaches that explicitly represent tree growth, mortality, and recruitment, enabling advances in the projection of forest vulnerability and resilience, as well as evaluation with field data. To date, simulation of regeneration processes has received far less attention than simulation of processes that affect growth and mortality, in spite of their critical role maintaining forest structure, facilitating turnover in forest composition over space and time, enabling recovery from disturbance, and regulating climate-driven range shifts. Here, our critical review of regeneration process representations within current Earth system vegetation demographic models reveals the need to improve parameter values and algorithms for reproductive allocation, dispersal, seed survival and germination, environmental filtering in the seedling layer, and tree regeneration strategies adapted to wind, fire, and anthropogenic disturbance regimes. These improvements require synthesis of existing data, specific field data-collection protocols, and novel model algorithms compatible with global-scale simulations. Vegetation demographic models offer the opportunity to more fully integrate ecological understanding into Earth system prediction; regeneration processes need to be a critical part of the effort.

Tree regeneration is a key process in forest dynamics, particularly in the context of forest resilience and climate change. Models are pivotal for assessing long‐term forest dynamics, and they have been in use for more than 50 years. However, there is a need to evaluate their capacity to accurately represent tree regeneration. We assess how well current models capture the overall abundance, species composition, and mortality of tree regeneration. Using 15 models built to capture long‐term forest dynamics at the stand, landscape, and global levels, we simulate tree regeneration at 200 sites representing large environmental gradients across Central Europe. The results are evaluated against extensive data from unmanaged forests. Most of the models overestimate recruitment levels, which is compensated only in some models by high simulated mortality rates in the early stages of individual‐tree dynamics. Simulated species diversity of recruitment generally matches observed ranges. Models simulating higher stand‐level species diversity do not feature higher species diversity in the recruitment layer. The effect of light availability on recruitment levels is captured better than the effects of temperature and soil moisture, but patterns are not consistent across models. Increasing complexity in the tree regeneration modules is not related to higher accuracy of simulated tree recruitment. Furthermore, individual model design is more important than scale (stand, landscape, and global) and approach (empirical and process‐based) for accurately capturing tree regeneration. Despite the mismatches between simulation results and data, it is remarkable that most models capture the essential features of the highly complex process of tree regeneration, while not having been parameterized with such data. We conclude that much can be gained by evaluating and refining the modeling of tree regeneration processes. This has the potential to render long‐term projections of forest dynamics under changing environmental conditions much more robust.

Elevated tree mortality and reduced recruitment of new trees linked to drought and fires has been reported across a range of forests over the last few decades. Forests that resprout new foliage epicormically from buds beneath the bark are considered highly resilient to disturbance, but are potentially at risk of elevated mortality, demographic shifts and changes to species composition due to synergistic effects of drought and fire. Despite this, the effects of drought-fire interactions on such forests remain largely unknown. We assessed the effects of drought severity and fire frequency on juvenile mortality, post-fire seedling recruitment and replacement of juvenile trees (balance of recruitment minus mortality) following fire. We compared dry ridgetops and wet gullies (i.e. two forest types that inhabit different topographic positions in the landscape) across a temperate forest in southern Australia. Both forest types experienced higher rates of fire-induced juvenile mortality in areas that had experienced severe drought compared to moderate drought, though mortality rates were generally low across all drought and fire combinations (e.g. < 15%). This result indicated that topographic position did little to reduce juvenile mortality when exposed to severe drought plus fire. In wet forest, severe drought also reduced recruitment and replacement of dead juveniles by post-fire seedlings compared to moderate drought. In dry forest net-negative replacement increased with the severity of drought. Across both forest types, the total pool of juveniles was reduced under severe drought (by 16–79 in DSF; 5–11 in WSF). Future increases in the frequency of coupled severe drought and fire could potentially increase the susceptibility of resilient temperate forests to major changes in structure and function.

A better understanding on the consequences of drought on forests can be reached by paying special attention to their resilience capacity, i.e., the ability to return to a state similar to pre-drought conditions. Nevertheless, extreme droughts may surpass the threshold for the resilience capacity triggering die-off causing multiple changes at varying spatial and temporal scales and affecting diverse processes (tree growth and regeneration, ecosystem productivity). Combining several methodological tools allows reaching a comprehensive characterization of post-drought forest resilience. We evaluated the changes in the abundance, regeneration capacity (seedling abundance), and radial growth (annual tree rings) of the main tree species. We also assessed if drought-induced reductions in growth and regeneration of the dominant tree species scale-up to drops in vegetation productivity by using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). We studied two conifer forests located in north-eastern Spain which displayed drought-induced die-off during the last decades: a Scots pine ( ) forest under continental Mediterranean conditions and a Silver fir ( ) forest under more temperate conditions. We found a strong negative impact of a recent severe drought (2012) on Scots pine growth, whereas the coexisting showed positive trends in basal area increment (0.02 ± 0.003 cm yr ). No Scots pine recruitment was observed in sites with intense die-off, but and recruited. The 2012 drought event translated into a strong NDVI reduction (32% lower than the 1982-2014 average). In Silver fir we found a negative impact of the 2012 drought on short-term radial growth, whilst long-term growth of Silver fir and the coexisting showed positive trends. Growth rates were higher in (0.04 ± 0.003 cm yr ) than in (0.02 ± 0.004 cm yr ). These two species recruited beneath declining and non-declining Silver fir trees. The 2012 drought translated into a strong NDVI reduction which lasted until 2013. The results presented here suggest two different post-drought vegetation pathways. In the Scots pine forest, the higher growth and recruitment rates of correspond to a vegetation shift where Scots pine is being replaced by the drought-tolerant juniper. Conversely, in the Silver fir forest there is an increase of growth and abundance but no local extinction of the Silver fir. Further research is required to monitor the evolution of these forests in the forthcoming years to illustrate the cumulative impacts of drought on successional dynamics.

The alpine treeline is highly sensitive to temperature change, and treelines worldwide have been rapidly responding to temperature warming by increasing in tree density. However, often inconsistent or even conflicting results, regarding the response of tree recruitment to temperature change across regions, still challenge our profound comprehension of warming‐induced treeline dynamics. Here, we quantified the temperature sensitivity of tree recruitment within alpine treeline ecotones (i.e. the strength of relationship between tree recruitment and temperature change), and tested whether and how the temperature sensitivity changed along latitudinal gradients by examining 124 alpine treelines across North America and Asia. Our analyses demonstrated that temperature changes could significantly influence tree recruitment at treeline ecotones and the sensitivity of tree recruitment to temperature change was significantly and positively associated with latitude, showing that tree recruitment was more sensitive to temperature change at high latitudes than at low latitudes. Our findings highlighted the heterogeneous responses of tree recruitment at alpine treelines to temperature changes across latitudinal gradients, which should be incorporated into assessment models to improve future projections of global warming impacts across alpine ecosystems.

Fifty years ago, Janzen (1970) and Connell (1971) independently published a revolutionary idea to explain the hyperdiverse tree communities of the tropics. The essential observations were that seedfall is concentrated in the vicinity of fruiting trees, whereas saplings recruit at a distance from reproductive conspecifics. These observations were encapsulated in a simple focal-tree model constructed of intersecting curves for seedfall and escape from host-specific enemies postulated to attack propagules (seeds and seedlings) in the vicinity of reproductive conspecifics. In conflict with the thinking of the times, the mechanism operates from the top down rather than from the bottom up. A deterrent to broad acceptance has been the giant intuitive leap required to generalize the focal tree model to an entire forest community. Recent theoretical and empirical results have succeeded in bridging the gap between the focal tree model and its community-level implications. With these new findings, Janzen–Connell has come of age.

To assess how the decimation of large vertebrates by hunting alters recruitment processes in a tropical forest, we compared the sapling cohorts of two structurally and compositionally similar forests in the Rio Manu floodplain in southeastern Peru. Large vertebrates were severely depleted at one site, Boca Manu (BM), whereas the other, Cocha Cashu Biological Station (CC), supported an intact fauna. At both sites we sampled small (≥1 m tall, <1 cm dbh) and large (≥1 cm and <10 cm dbh) saplings in the central portion of 4-ha plots within which all trees ≥10 cm dbh were mapped and identified. This design ensured that all conspecific adults within at least 50 m (BM) or 55 m (CC) of any sapling would have known locations. We used the Janzen-Connell model to make five predictions about the sapling cohorts at BM with respect to CC: (1) reduced overall sapling recruitment, (2) increased recruitment of species dispersed by abiotic means, (3) altered relative abundances of species, (4) prominence of large-seeded species among those showing depressed recruitment, and (5) little or no tendency for saplings to cluster closer to adults at BM. Our results affirmed each of these predictions. Interpreted at face value, the evidence suggests that few species are demographically stable at BM and that up to 28% are increasing and 72% decreasing. Loss of dispersal function allows species dispersed abiotically and by small birds and mammals to substitute for those dispersed by large birds and mammals. Although we regard these conclusions as preliminary, over the long run, the observed type of directional change in tree composition is likely to result in biodiversity loss and negative feedbacks on both the animal and plant communities. Our results suggest that the best, and perhaps only, way to prevent compositional change and probable loss of diversity in tropical tree communities is to prohibit hunting.

Tree regeneration is a key process for long‐term forest dynamics, determining changes in species composition and shaping successional trajectories. While tree regeneration is a highly stochastic process, tree regeneration studies often cover narrow environmental gradients only, focusing on specific forest types or species in distinct regions. Thus, the larger‐scale effects of temperature, water availability, and stand structure on tree regeneration are poorly understood. We investigated these effects in respect of tree recruitment (in‐growth) along wide environmental gradients using forest inventory data from Flanders (Belgium), northwestern Germany, and Switzerland covering more than 40 tree species. We employed generalized linear mixed models to capture the abundance of tree recruitment in response to basal area, stem density, shade casting ability of a forest stand as well as site‐specific degree‐day sum (temperature), water balance, and plant‐available water holding capacity. We grouped tree species to facilitate comparisons between species with different levels of tolerance to shade and drought. Basal area and shade casting ability of the overstory had generally a negative impact on tree recruitment, but the effects differed between levels of shade tolerance of tree recruitment in all study regions. Recruitment rates of very shade‐tolerant species were positively affected by shade casting ability. Stem density and summer warmth (degree‐day sum) had similar effects on all tree species and successional strategies. Water‐related variables revealed a high degree of uncertainty and did not allow for general conclusions. All variables had similar effects independent of the varying diameter thresholds for tree recruitment in the different data sets. Synthesis: Shade tolerance and stand structure are the main drivers of tree recruitment along wide environmental gradients in temperate forests. Higher temperature generally increases tree recruitment rates, but the role of water relations and drought tolerance remains uncertain for tree recruitment on cross‐regional scales. This study presents an analysis of tree recruitment in different regions with large environmental gradients. We show that stand structure, shade tolerance. And temperature are main drivers of tree recruitment. Furthermore, the effect of water relations is subject to a high degree of uncertainty.

There are several mechanisms that allow plants to temporarily escape from top-down control. One of them is trophic cascades triggered by top predators or pathogens. Another is satiation of consumers by mast seeding. These two mechanisms have traditionally been studied in separation. However, their combined action may have a greater effect on plant release than either process alone. In 2015, an outbreak of a disease (African swine fever, ASF) caused a crash in wild boar ( Sus scrofa ) abundance in Białowieża Primeval Forest. Wild boar are important consumers of acorns and are difficult to satiate relative to less mobile granivores. We hypothesized that the joint action of the ASF outbreak and masting would enhance regeneration of oaks ( Quercus robur ). Data from ungulate exclosures demonstrated that ASF led to reduction in acorn predation. Tree seedling data indicated that oak recruitment increased twofold relative to pre-epidemic period. Our results showed that perturbations caused by wildlife disease travel through food webs and influence forest dynamics. The outbreak of ASF acted synergistically with masting and removed herbivore top-down control of oaks by mobile consumers. This illustrates that the ASF epidemic that currently occurs across Europe can have broad effects on forest dynamics.