Giving Compass' Take:

• In this story from Pacific Standard, author Shreya Dasgupta discusses a recent study by doctoral students at Texas A&M which suggests that even four decades of abandonment may not be enough to return plantations to their natural state. Ashish Nerlekar, the lead author of the study, and his colleagues use a eucalyptus plantation in India's Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve as an example of this point.

• Does this information change the way we should think about sustainable farming practices? Should conservation advocates focus their efforts on returning abandoned plantations to their natural states?

• To learn about how to guarantee the best results from conservation policies, click here.

In the past century, large parts of wet evergreen forest ... in Tamil Nadu state were cleared to make way for plantations including tea, coffee, and cardamom. Vast forested areas were also felled for eucalyptus plantations, with the timber mainly to be used as fuelwood for the tea industry. However ... many plantations were eventually abandoned and the area has been on a path of recovery ever since. Some plantations have now been regenerating for nearly 40 years.

In 2016, Ashish Nerlekar, lead author of the study published in the Journal of Tropical Ecology and a doctoral student at Texas A&M University, looked at one such eucalyptus plantation ... The plantation had been abandoned for 36 years as of 2016, and was surrounded by primary, old-growth forest.

"Because it's the Western Ghats and because there has not been any major disturbance after abandonment, I thought the plantation would be very close to the primary forest," Nerlekar says. "I was expecting some degree of structural resemblance in terms of species richness and so on. I was also expecting to see at least 20 to 30 percent of the trees characteristic of the primary forest in the plantations."

"One of the most surprising findings was that, even after 36 years, the abandoned plantation patches don't resemble the neighboring forest in terms of structure and function," says co-author Vignesh Kamath, an independent researcher with Gubbi Labs in Bengaluru. "One would assume that a period of nearly four decades of letting nature take over would be enough to restore a disturbed forest, but our study found evidence against it. It makes one wonder how long would it really take to undo the changes caused by human activities?"

Read the full article about plantations by Shreya Dasgupta at Pacific Standard