Demographic superiority with increased logging in tropical understorey insectivorous birds

1. Selective logging is pervasive in the tropics and is among the most urgent threats to tropical biodiversity. The vast areas of logged tropical forest are often vulnerable to relogging, clear-felling, burning or conversion to plantations, despite evidence that logged forests retain a large proportion of tropical forest species at high abundances compared with alternate land uses. However, the demographic processes (e.g. survival, fecundity) that drive community or species properties (e.g. occurrence, density) in response to logging have never been examined. 2. We used a novel capture–recapture-based sampling design to separate in situ reproduction from immigration-fuelled recruitment to investigate the demographic vital rates of six forest-dependent understorey insectivorous bird species along a logging continuum in the Eastern Himalaya Global Biodiversity Hotspot. We expected a positive relationship between forest intactness and reproductive rates, and that intact patches would contr...