Fig 1.
Lopé National Park (LNP) and plots sampled in the north of the park characterised by a savanna-forest mosaic.
Map showing the location of the field site within a landcover map for the year 2000 [78] adapted from Mitchard et al. [21].
Fig 2.
Different forest types (left) and plot set up (right).
Fig 3.
Changes in soil characteristics with increasing depth per forest type (mean plotted).
Note that black dots refer to savanna, red dots: colonising forest (F1), green dots: monodominant Okoume forest (F2), blue dots: young Marantaceae forest (F3) and yellow dots: mixed Marantaceae forest (F4).
Table 1.
Soil characteristics, 0-30cm depth, per forest type, including soil pH, Carbon %, C:N ratio, effective cation exchange capacity (eCEC), Bulk Density (BD), soil carbon and total Phosphorus.
Table 2.
Soil characteristics, 0-30cm depth, per forest type, for several weatherable elements.
Table 3.
Above ground biomass (AGB in Mg ha-1), annual change (AGB change in Mg ha-1 year-1), changes in AGB related to losses from mortality (AGB Mort in Mg ha-1) and gains for recruitment (AGB Recr in Mg ha-1) and growth of surviving stems (AGB Grow in Mg ha-1), basal area (BA in m2 ha-1), stem density (S in number stems ha-1), wood mass density weighted by BA (WMDBA) in 1993 and 2013 per forest type.
Table 4.
Species richness (No spp), Shannon index (H’), A. klaineana dominance (in %BA), L. alata dominance (in %BA) and the Bray-Curtis (BC) Index of dissimilarity in 1993 and 2013 (compared with the following vegetation type in the succession in 1993) per forest type.
Fig 4.
Changes of plots over time with regard to AGB and SD for each single plot (dotted line), and the mean per forest type (continuous line).
Fig 5.
Above ground biomass (AGB in Mg ha-1), in relation to basal area (BA in m2 ha-1), stem density (SD in number stems ha-1) and wood mass density weighted by BA (WMD) in 1993 (left) and 2013 (right). Red: colonising forest (F1), green: monodominant Okoume forest (F2), blue: young Marantaceae forest (F3) and yellow: mixed Marantaceae forest (F4).
Fig 6.
Mean vertical profiles per vegetation type.
Table 5.
Mean soil Carbon stocks in this study and several studies available in Africa.