For more than 20 years, a research group has studied a piece of forest in the West African Ivory Coast to determine whether and, if so, how quickly the ecosystem returns to its original condition after a clear blow. In the journal "Forest Ecology and Management" you will come to the end: possibly not at all. For example, even over 40 years after deforestation, some types of frogs have still not immigrated again. Some may not immigrate in the foreseeable future, even if adjacent forest pieces are still intact.
The team led by the Ivor Tokouaho Flora Kpan focused on frogs because the amphibians are good indicators for the intactness of an ecosystem because of their often very different location requirements. The scientists of the team are considered to be a questionable sign that the forest in the Taï National Park, in which wood was still beaten in 1970, is considered to be a questionable sign.
Until now, forestry had assumed that it would take about 30 years for a forest to renew itself and "you can only think about using it economically again," says co-author Raffael Ernst of the Senckenberg Natural History Collections in Dresden. Now we see that it will probably take 40 to 60 years for the original ecosystem to be restored in its depth and breadth." Above all, large, structuring trees would be missing in the regrown forest.
