Tropical forests are forests located in tropical regions. Tropical regions lie between
the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn latitudes, which include parts of North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. They contribute to half the forests around the world.
However, in recent years, the number of tropical forests has diminished due to deforestation.
Deforestation is when forests are cleared up for commercial purposes.
According to research published by more than eighty researchers from the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, etc., in the journal Science (Vol 374, Issue 6573), tropical forests can recover to 78% of their area within twenty years if they are free from human intervention.
This is an example of secondary succession, an ecological succession.
Secondary succession is the growth of a natural habitat, in this case, the forests, after being inhabited by humans.
Lourens Poorter of Wageningen University in the Netherlands and other researchers studied over seventy sites across the Americas and West Africa regrowing forests with different ages. Recovery of the soil in the forest is the fastest, whereas the recovery of the biodiversity and the structure of the forest takes more time.
Biodiversity consists of the animal and plants living in the forests, and the forest structure is the arrangement of the plants and animal species in the forest.
The recovery of the biodiversity and the forest structure takes up to 25 to sixty years. However, the recovery of the biomass takes more than 120 years.
Biomass is the total amount of living organic matter in trees represented in weight.
The recovery of a tropical forest that has been extensively used for agriculture can take more time.