Salvage logging cause short- and mid-term changes of successional trajectories following forest disturbance

<p>Following natural forest disturbances, additional anthropogenic disturbance may alter community recovery and successional trajectories by affecting the occurrences of species, functional groups and evolutionary lineages. However, our understanding is limited of whether rare, common, or dominant species, functional groups, or evolutionary lineages are most strongly affected by an additional disturbance, such as salvage logging. Here, we used a generalized diversity concept based on Hill numbers to quantify the community differences of vascular plants, bryophytes, lichens, wood-inhabiting fungi, saproxylic beetles, and birds following disturbances and experimental salvage logging. Most species groups showed no significant changes in dissimilarities between logged and unlogged plots over the first years of succession, indicating that salvage logging did not contribute to an accelerated decrease of initial dissimilarities. These dissimilarities between communities of were mainly driven by rare species. Trends in species dissimilarities only partially match the trends in dissimilarities of functional groups and evolutionary lineages, with little significant changes in successional trajectories. This talk highlights that salvage logging following natural disturbances can alter successional trajectories in early stages of forest succession following natural disturbances and that those changes persist over time. However, community changes over time may differ remarkably in different taxonomic groups and are best detected based on taxonomic, rather than functional or phylogenetic dissimilarities.</p>