Forest fragmentation is a major driver of overexploitation, ground fires, and invasions by alien species, since it increases accessibility and the edge to area ratio, and it also prevents species from moving in response to climate change. Reducing fragmentation is therefore a
major goal of tropical forest conservation. In some areas there is still time to minimise the initial fragmentation of forests as they are cleared for development, but in many other areas connectivity can only be increased by reforestation.
Planting the large areas needed with seedlings of native tree species raised in nurseries is expensive; so much current effort is devoted to finding ways of catalysing and enriching spontaneous forest succession so as to produce a diverse tree cover as rapidly as possible (Lamb, 2011)..