Can New Zealand's indigenous dryland ecosystems be rehabilitated by facilitating inherent successional tendencies to enhance development of indigenous‐dominated and often woody communities in the long term? Here, we describe the geographic distribution of woody communities of New Zealand's South Island drylands to generate hypotheses about successional trajectories to future vegetation states. Presences and absences of woody s...

Aim We describe compositional variation among forest fragments on Tongatapu in terms of successional status and site conditions. We then examine two factors that directly influence the potential for long‐term persistence of these fragments – tree regeneration and alien invasion. Location Tongatapu is the largest (261 km 2 ), most densely inhabited (population 67,000) island in the Kingdom of Tonga, western Polynesia. Inhabited...