Hawaii-based conservationists have been working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for more than a decade to restore the native rainforest of Palmyra Atoll, the lonely Central Pacific outpost previously owned by a Honolulu family for nearly 80 years.

The restoration campaign, as it turns out, is not only good for Palmyra Atoll, it’s good for the planet.

Research conducted by The Nature Conservancy and published in February in the journal PLOS One found that native trees at Palmyra will capture more climate-altering carbon dioxide than the island’s introduced palms, which now cover nearly 45% of the atoll.

The study measured the carbon impact of replacing the non-native palms with the island’s native rainforest trees and found that restoring the atoll to native tree dominance not only results in the storage of more carbon, it enhances biodiversity and reduces disease risk for corals.

The results add to a growing body of evidence that indicates planting trees — and, in this case, native trees — is good for fighting climate change.

Trees have been called the best carbon capture technology in the world. According to the U.S. Forest Service, America’s forests sequester 866 million tons of carbon a year, which is roughly 16% of the country’s annual emissions, depending on the year.

“Capturing carbon is an important global need as the Earth navigates toward a possible temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius,” said Alex Wegmann, a conservancy senior scientist and co-author of the paper.

The latest research emerges from the living laboratory that is Palmyra Atoll, the remote speck of land that the conservancy bought from the Fullard-Leo family of Honolulu in 2000 as part of a plan to turn it over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for a wildlife refuge.

At the time, Palmyra’s underwater environment was unrivaled anywhere in the world. But the land was still suffering from the effects of U.S military occupation during World War II, as well as the impacts of a coconut palm plantation. Non-native black rats were the island’s top predator, while the coconut palms left by the copra- farming operation dominated nearly half the forest.

The conservancy, working with the Fish and Wildlife Service and a nonprofit called Island Conservation, eradicated the rats and launched a plan to remove the palms and replace them with native trees preferred by seabirds.

So far the restoration effort is more than halfway finished. The project also is working to lure back eight native species of ground- nesting seabirds that were wiped out by the rats.

Wegmann said the goal is to make the island as resilient as possible in the face of climate change, including the major threat of sea level rise.

“We want to give it its best chance of surviving from whatever impacts are coming,” he said.

A study to measure the carbon capture capacity is admittedly not part of conservancy’s goal of restoring the island, Wegmann said. But scientists recognized a relatively easy opportunity to measure the impact their efforts were having on the atoll’s carbon dynamics, he said.

Wegmann said they really weren’t sure what impact they would find, especially given the fact that the coconut palm has more biomass above the ground than the island’s native trees. It was very possible, he said, they could have detected a negative carbon impact.

But that was not the case.

For the study, the authors used field sampling, remote sensing and known parameter estimates to model the total carbon accumulation potential of Palmyra’s forest before and after the island’s transformation.

The research showed that the new forest will increase carbon storage on the atoll’s land areas by 11%. Turns out the native trees — Pisonia grandis and Heliotropium beach — have more carbon- capturing power in their roots.

The research showed the new forest would not only increase carbon storage but reduce the flow of dissolved organic carbon into the island’s lagoon, leaving healthier corals and the species that rely on the reefs.

“We’ve demonstrated that better stewardship of natural resources can increase their carbon capture ability,” lead author Kate Longley- Wood said in a news release. “That native tree species are better for carbon capture AND ocean health is the icing on the cake.”

The findings, she said, can help managers elsewhere understand how native forest restoration can increase the carbon capture potential and other benefits of their projects.

“If we can do this at Palmyra, this can be done elsewhere,” Wegmann added.

But can a reef system already considered one of the best in the world actually improve under the influence of the new forest?

“Can it get better?” Wegmann said. “We’re gonna find out.”