Varying impacts of logging frequency on tree communities and carbon storage across evergreen and deciduous tropical forests in the Andaman Islands, India

The majority of Earth’s tropical forests have been selectively logged; some on repeated occasions. Selective logging is known to affect forest structure, composition and function in various ways, but how such effects vary with logging frequency and across forest types remains unclear. In the Andaman Archipelago in India, we examined adult and pole-sized trees in baseline (unlogged since 1990s), once-logged (logged between 2007 and 2014) and twice-logged (logged in early 1990s and between 2007 and 2014) evergreen and deciduous forests, and tested whether higher logging frequency was associated with lower canopy cover, tree density, tree diversity, aboveground carbon stocks and divergence in species composition, including increased relative abundances of deciduous species in these forests. While once-logged evergreen and deciduous forests were similar to their respective baselines for most attributes assessed, and twice-logged evergreen forests had 22–24% lower adult tree density and dive...