Abstract
The demand for timber products is facilitating the degradation and opening up of large areas of intact habitats rich in biodiversity. Logging creates an extensive network of access roads within the forest, yet these are commonly ignored or excluded when assessing impacts of logging on forest biodiversity. Here we determine the impact of these roads on the overall condition of selectively logged forests in Borneo, Southeast Asia. Focusing on dung beetles along >40km logging roads we determine: (i) the magnitude and extent of edge effects alongside logging roads; (ii) whether vegetation characteristics can explain patterns in dung beetle communities, and; (iii) how the inclusion of road edge forest impacts dung beetle assemblages within the overall logged landscape. We found that while vegetation structure was significantly affected up to 34m from the road edge, impacts on dung beetle communities penetrated much further and were discernible up to 170m into the forest interior. We found larger species and particularly tunnelling species responded more than other functional groups which were also influenced by micro-habitat variation. We provide important new insights into the long-term ecological impacts of tropical logging. We also support calls for improved logging road design both during and after timber extraction to conserve more effectively biodiversity in production forests, for instance, by considering the minimum volume of timber, per unit length of logging road needed to justify road construction. In particular, we suggest that governments and certification bodies need to highlight more clearly the biodiversity and environmental impacts of logging roads.
Highlights
Large areas of intact habitats rich in biodiversity are being opened up through extractive industries, including selective logging
We considered that edge effects were unlikely to extend beyond 100 m (Benedick et al, 2006; Broadbent et al, 2008; Lucey and Hill, 2011; Gray et al, 2016) but to check whether or not this was the case and to determine how dung beetle assemblages differed between road edges and the interior of logged forest, we placed traps (n = 58) 100 m apart along 14 transects at distances of 170 m to 550 m from the nearest road edge, with 4–5 traps per transect and a minimum distance of 500 m between transects
This study provides one of the first examples of how tropical biodiversity responds to logging roads per se (Laurance, 2004; Hosaka et al, 2014a), and assesses what the broader impact of timber extraction is by accounting for the hidden additional effects of logging roads
Summary
Large areas of intact habitats rich in biodiversity are being opened up through extractive industries, including selective logging. Logging concessions account for ≈ 50% of the total area of tropical forests (Blaser et al, 2011), yet a largely overlooked impact of timber extraction is the creation of logging roads. Roads are an integral part of extractive industries, which require large transportation routes, and secondary haulage trails and smaller access pathways, creating a sprawling ‘fishbone’ pattern of compressed barren surfaces mostly unpaved. F.A. Edwards et al / Biological Conservation 205 (2017) 85–92 of logging on biodiversity have either explicitly or implicitly avoided roads in their sampling protocols, leading to calls for further studies of their impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (Hamer et al, 2003; Broadbent et al, 2008; Laufer et al, 2013)
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