For centuries, millions of hectares of tropical forests have been cleared and replaced by commercial plantations or converted to agricultural lands. Some of these have been abandoned and provide opportunities for restoring natural forests and augment the depleting forest cover in the tropics. In India as in other parts of the world, many
commercial plantations such as tea, coffee and cardamom are located in biodiversity-rich areas and some of them get abandoned due to various reasons. Such abandoned lands provide an opportunity to understand the ecological processes of succession and explore cost-effective ecological restoration models. My research work focuses on tea plantations to understand the ecological, social, economic and legal dimensions that need to be considered for restoring natural forests in abandoned plantations. I studied the ecological processes of colonisation by native species in abandoned plantations and the socioeconomic aspects in both abandoned and managed plantations in the Agasthyamalai region of the southern Western Ghats.