Proc. R. Soc. B doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.1062 (2010)

Take a biodiverse rainforest in Southeast Asia. Log it, let the area regrow, then repeat. What do you have? Not much of ecological value, many scientists would say. As a result, such 'degraded' lands have often been turned into oil palm plantations.

But David Edwards at the University of Leeds, UK, and his co-workers have now found that such twice-logged forests retain a surprising amount of biodiversity. Using birds and dung beetles as proxies for biodiversity, the researchers surveyed 18 sites in Borneo — some never logged, some logged once, some twice. From their nets, traps and by using binoculars, the authors determined that more than 75% of species found in unlogged forests continued to live in doubly logged forests.

Credit: D. EDWARDS