Effects of Afforestation on Plant Diversity and Soil Quality in Semiarid SE Spain Segura, Carmen Jiménez Morales, María Noelia Fernández Ondoño, Emilia Navarro, Francisco Bruno Active restoration Functional groups Plant richness Soil properties Land use changes Mediterranean region UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration Farmland afforestation has been promoted in recent decades and is one of the main strat‐ egies included in the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration to recover degraded areas. However, the impacts of afforestation on plant diversity and soil quality indicators are still not well‐under‐ stood in semiarid environments. In this study, we assessed the relationships between plant diversity indicators (abundance, total richness, richness by functional groups, and Shannon diversity) and a large number of variables in 48 afforestation sites in southeast Spain. We considered associated en‐ vironmental factors, such as geographical, climatic or edaphic variables, age, and land‐use history. We compared plant diversity and soil properties following land‐use change from cereal cropping to afforestation, which is one of the most common land‐use changes in Mediterranean areas. Plant diversity in afforested sites was found to be dependent on previous land use, the proximity of nat‐ ural vegetation, several soil properties (texture, pH, and total nitrogen), and plantation age. Affor‐ ested soils showed higher plant diversity and an improvement in edaphic parameters related to multifunctionality in semiarid ecosystems (i.e., soil organic carbon, nitrogen, and potassium) than arable cropped soils. 2021-12-09T08:14:30Z 2021-12-09T08:14:30Z 2021 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Segura, C.; Jiménez, M.N.; Fernández‐Ondoño, E.; Navarro, F.B. Effects of Afforestation on Plant Diversity and Soil Quality in Semiarid SE Spain. Forests 2021, 12, 1730. https://doi.org/10.3390/ f12121730 http://hdl.handle.net/10481/71927 10.3390/f12121730 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España MDPI