removal, a secondary forest can protect the watershed from further erosion and provides habitat. Secondary forests may also buffer edge effects around mature forest fragments and increase connectivity between them. They may also be a source of wood and other forest products. Today most of the forests of the United States- especially in the eastern part of North America, as well as forests of Europe consist of secondary forest. When forests are harvested, they either regenerate naturally or artificially (by planting and seeding select tree species). The result is a second growth forest which is less biodiverse than the old growth forest. In order to increase the biodiversity, it is possible to create low to moderate disturbances. Examples of these could be felling certain trees, damaging the tree trunks, and the creating small controlled burns. Low to moderate disturbances have been shown to be extremely beneficial to increase in biodiversity in secondary forests. These secondary disturbances can clear the canopies to encourage lower canopy growth as well as provide habitats for small organisms such as insects, bacteria and fungi which may feed on the decaying plant material. Rainforests In the case of semi-tropical rainforests, where soil nutrient levels are characteristically low, the soil quality may be significantly diminished following the removal of primary forest. In Panama, growth of new forests from abandoned farmland exceeded loss of primary rainforest in 1990. However, due to the diminished quality of soil, among other factors, the presence of a significant majority of primary forest species fail to recover in these second-growth forests. See also Land use, land-use change and forestry Land use Overlogging Notes References CIFOR Secondary Forest FAO Forestry World Resource Institute External links M. van Breugel, 2007, Dynamics of secondary forests. PhD Thesis Wageningen University. Uzay. U Sezen, 2007, Parentage analysis of a regenerating palm tree in a tropical second-growth forest. Ecological Society of America, Ecology 88: 3065-3075. Rozendaal et al., 2019, Biodiversity recovery of Neotropical secondary forests Science Advances, 2019-03-06 Forest ecology Forests Reforestation Environmental issues with forests