Managed logging negatively affects the density and abundance of some dry forest specialist bird species of northeastern Brazil

The Caatinga, the largest region of seasonally dry tropical forest in the
Neotropics, suffers high rates of deforestation and habitat degradation,
mostly due to wood extraction. As an alternative to illegal logging,
governments have looked at more sustainable management schemes, allowing
natural regeneration after logging through relatively long (~ 25-yr)
harvest rotations. We investigated the impacts of forest management at a
1,700-ha privately-owned area located at the Araripe Plateau, in the
semi-arid interior of northeastern Brazil, focusing on the population
parameters of eight avian species. The property was subdivided into 22
forest stands, where a different stand has been logged every year since
2004. By 2016, when we sampled the avifauna, 12 forest stands had already
been logged and allowed to regrow, creating a landscape of logged and
unlogged stands and a 12-yr forest recovery chrono-sequence. We conducted
distance-based sampling along transects to estimate the density and
abundance of these species in logged and unlogged stands. We found that
logging impacted three of the target species. Two of them (Megaxenops
parnaguae and Synallaxis scutata) were less abundant,
whereas another (Sclerurus cearensis) disappeared altogether from logged
areas. We also found a positive correlation between the NDVI and avian
density of the affected species. However, we failed to observe any
significant relationship between forest recovery or NDVI and species
densities, suggesting that even after 12-yr of forest recovery, species
abundance remains lower in logged than in unlogged areas. We found that
logging impacted birds in a species-specific manner, with five species
unaffected and three species declining. Although our sampling occurred
halfway through the regeneration cycle, we found no evidence of recovery
for those species most affected. We suggest keeping unlogged areas
intermingled with logged stands, allowing the survival and potential
recovery of species in regenerating forests.