Fig. 2: Variation in predicted recovery time to 90% of old-growth forest values.

a,b, Recovery time is shown across taxa and community attributes for cacao (a) and pasture (b) legacies. Recovery time estimates the time span until species composition (Bray–Curtis similarity), species diversity (Shannon diversity, that is exponential Shannon entropy, Hill number of order 1) and total abundance of each investigated taxon group in secondary forests reaches 90% of old-growth forest reference (Fig. 1 and Methods). The dotted vertical line marks 30 years, the time at which the relative recovery was evaluated (Table 1). Coloured dots indicate different metrics. The 95% CIs for recovery times range from white (>50/820 years for cacao/pasture) and light-grey silhouettes (<50/820 years for cacao/pasture) to black (0 years) on a logarithmic scale; exact values of CIs of recovery times can be found in Table 1, Supplementary Table 1 and Extended Data Fig. 3. The 95% CIs were estimated using a jackknife procedure (Fig. 3 and Methods) based on n − 1 iterations with n being the number of independent plots sampled per taxon and legacy, with n = 39 plots for cacao (a) and n = 40 for pasture plots (b) in all cases, except: bacteria in 10-cm depth, n = 18/20; bacteria in 50-cm depth, n = 14/14; leaf-litter arthropods, n = 19/19; frogs, n = 23/23; seedlings, n = 24/24; and nocturnal insects, n = 39/38; given for cacao/pasture). Thereby, CIs indicate the range in which 95% of all jackknife curves are located. Taxa marked with an asterisk were set to a recovery time of 0 years (Supplementary Note 2). Bacteria showed extremely long recovery time which could not be shown on the same scale. Taxa are represented by symbols and described in the legend; they are grouped by their sampling method and may partly overlap. For instance, ‘nocturnal insects’ represent one dataset based on light traps; other insects (for example, moths and bees) may contain nocturnal species as well. Bird data are based on sound trap recordings, whereas frugivorous birds were recorded by direct observations. The taxa in the legend are ordered according to their generation time ranging from low (bacteria) to high (trees). a,b, Cacao (a) and pasture (b) icons reproduced with permissions from ref. ⁵³, Ecological Society of America, under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence. Silhouettes of saproxylic beetle, bee, moth, dung beetle, nocturnal insect, ant, bird and ground bird were created by G. Brehm under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. The following silhouettes were reproduced from PhyloPic (https://www.phylopic.org/): frog and ground mammal, created by M. Michaud under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain licence; bat, created by Y. Wong under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain licence; frugivorous bird, created by E. Price under a CC BY 4.0 licence; seedling, created by M. Hofstetter under a CC BY 3.0 licence; tree, created by T. M. Keesey under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain licence; leaf-litter arthropod, created by B. Lang under a CC BY 3.0 licence; bacteria 10-cm depth and bacteria 50-cm depth, created by L. Simons under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain licence.