Form Submission: Participation Entry

Selective logging is less impactful than other types of human disturbance that involve land clearing, such as clear-cutting, agricultural/plantation land use, or mining. Nevertheless, how selective logging impacts the forest structure and community diversity of forests across demographic stages and over time is not well understood. In order to explore the impacts of selective logging, I sampled vegetation plots across recently logged (~1 year since logging), older logged (~10 years since logging) and unlogged forests in Northwestern Gabon. We found that selectively logged forests see the greatest changes to forest structure and shifts in diversity, most immediately (~1 year) after logging, and some aspects of forest structure (e.g. basal area) and diversity in older, more long-lived canopy layers may recover over longer periods of time. Understanding how recovery takes places across different demographic layers and forest ages is critical to predicting what logged forests will look like in the future.