A decade of diversity and forest structure: Post-logging patterns across life stages in an Afrotropical forest

Tropical forests are under threat of increasing pressure from income-generating land uses. Selective logging is a compromise that allows the use of the land while leaving much of the forest canopy intact across a landscape. However, the ecological impacts of selective logging are unclear, with evidence of positive, negative, and negligible effects on forest structure and diversity. We examined the impact of selective logging on the structure and diversity of evergreen tropical forests in the Monts de Cristal region, a chain of mid-elevation hills in northwestern Gabon. For three size classes (seedling, sapling, and adult) of woody plant species, we tested whether forest structure (canopy openness, stem density, basal area, and relative liana abundances) and diversity were altered in forests that had been logged one year and ten years prior, compared to unlogged forest. In general, we found no large impact of selective logging treatment on the structure and diversity of adult woody pl...,

To assess the impact of selective logging on forest structure and diversity, we established a total of 80 vegetation plots between September 2018 and October 2019 (Fig. 1C). Each plot was 400 m2 in area (20 × 20 m). In order to capture the heterogeneous impact that selective logging can have on the forest, we randomly located 20 plots within each of three logging treatment areas: recently logged forest that had been logged approximately one year prior, older logged forest that had been logged ten years prior, and two unlogged forest areas. We measured two separate unlogged areas in order to try and capture some of the natural spatial variation in these forests. For all analyses, we considered the two unlogged areas as a single control treatment. We generated random point sampling schemes based on boundaries of yearly logging blocks using the sp package (Pebesma and Bivand, 2005, Bivand et al., 2013).
To sample the adult tree community, all free-standing woody stems ≥10 cm DBH were ta..., ,