Scientists once thought it would take a century or more for animals to return to deforested land in the tropics. Now, new research has found ecosystems can recover in mere decades.
“It’s been a huge surprise for all of us,” said Timo Metz, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and first author of the study, published in the journal Nature. “None of us expected it to be so impressive and so quick.”
Rainforests have been disappearing at an alarming pace for at least a century, and millions of acres a year are still burned or cut down for logging, farming or ranching, or are lost to wildfires. In 2024, the rate of loss was as fast as 18 soccer fields per minute, adding up to an area nearly the size of Panama.
At the same time, hundreds of millions of acres of formerly deforested land are thought to be regrowing. Scientists have generally found that it takes more than a century for trees and plants to fully resemble the old, original pristine forest. It was long assumed that animals would take just as long to return.
The new study found that’s not necessarily the case. “The expectation was that the animals would need the forest to come first,” Dr. Metz said. “But surprisingly, many of the animals recover much more quickly than the trees.”
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