**5. Conclusions**

Our study highlighted how DNA barcoding can be efficient in identifying tree species in an Afromontane Forest. As in lowland forests, identification success is higher at genus than at species level. Identification success was higher than in lowland forest, due to the non-prevalence of highly diverse genera in this habitat. The comparison of species-to-genus among other sites with comparable data showed that Afromontane forests tend to have a low S/G ratio for tree species, which is an advantage for the use of DNA barcode in these forests.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, D.K.; methodology, D.K., I.A. and H.C., investigation, D.K., I.A. and H.C.; data curation, D.K. and I.A.; writing—original draft preparation, D.K.; writing review and editing, D.K., I.A. and H.C.; funding acquisition, D.K. and H.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This study was made possible by the generous donation made by Retired General T.Y. Danjuma to the Nigerian Montane Forest Project (NMFP) through H. Chapman. Additional support towards the plot census and DNA barcoding was provided by the Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The Chester Zoo, England, and A.G. Leventis Foundation also provided additional financial assistance to the NMFP.

**Data Availability Statement:** Full census data for the Ngel Nyaki plot is available upon reasonable request from the ForestGEO data portal http://ctfs.si.edu/datarequest/ and the full plant DNA barcode library is available on BOLD (http://www.boldsystems.org/) (accessed on 10 February 2022).

**Acknowledgments:** We wish to thank the staff of the Ngel Nyaki Montane Forest Program, especially the ForestGEO local team who carried out the tree census and collected the DNA tissue and vouchers. We are also grateful to Douglas Sheil and Robert Bitariho for their authorization to use the Bwindi data, to Terry Sunderland for sharing the Takamanda data with us and finally to Daniel Zuleta for writing the R script to estimate the barcode success from the genetic distance matrix.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
