India, Oct. 4 -- Most of us have seen the tree-planting photo ops. A group of happy volunteers, some seedlings, a hashtag. But what happens to those trees in 20 years? That's what a 2026 study in Restoration Ecology looked at using monitoring data collected through 2023. Researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in China went back to a riverside where their team had planted native trees in 2003. They found that the site had only 19% to 30% of the tree diversity and biomass of a nearby intact rainforest.

In 2003, the researchers planted small clusters of native trees along a degraded riverside corridor about 12 kilometers long. This method is called applied nucleation. Instead of planting the whole area, you plant small...