Choosing species for reforestation in diverse forest communities: social preference versus ecological suitability

Choosing species for reforestation programs or community forestry in species‐rich tropical rainforest ecosystems is a complex task. Reforestation objectives, social preferences, and ecological attributes must be balanced to achieve landscape restoration, timber production, or community forestry objectives. Here we develop a method to make better species choices for reforestation programs with native species when limited silvicultural information is available. We conducted community surveys to determine social preference of tree species and inferred their ecological suitability for open‐field plantations from growth rates and frequency in forest plots at different successional stages. Several species, for which silvicultural data was available, were correctly classified as promising or unsuitable for open‐field reforestation. Notably, we found a strong negative correlation between ecological suitability indicators and socioeconomic preference ranks. Only a single outlier species ranked very high in both categories. This result highlights the difficulty of finding suitable native species for community forestry and offers an explanation why reforestation efforts with native species often fail. We concluded that the approach should be a useful first screening of species‐rich forest communities for potential reforestation species. Our results also support the view that species‐rich tropical rainforests are not an easily renewable natural resource in a sense that secondary forests will not provide an equivalent resource value to local communities.