Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Forest Ecology and Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/foreco Effects of selective timber harvest on amphibian species diversity in Budongo forest Reserve, Uganda Wilber Lukwago a , Mathias Behangana b , Edward N. Mwavu a , Daniel F. Hughes c, ⁎ a School of Forestry, Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Makerere University, P.O. Box 7062, Kampala , Uganda b National Biodiversity Data Bank (NBDB), Makerere University, P.O. Box 7298, Kampala, Uganda c Section of Herpetology, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Africa Conservation Composition Diversity Frogs Logging ABSTRACT We studied the effects of forest management on amphibian communities in the Budongo Central Forest Reserve, Uganda. We sampled amphibians from May to August of 2012 in four compartments with different logging and arboricide-treatment histories. We used pitfall traps with drift fences combined with visual encounter surveys to sample amphibians from 36 plots in four 1-km long transects along the Sonso River. From 126 encounters across plots, we recorded 25 frog species belonging to six families and eight genera. Arthroleptidae was the most diverse family represented by 10 species within two genera. Arthroleptis had the highest number of species (six), Ptychadena the second most (five), followed by Leptopelis (four) and Sclerophrys (four). Species composition differed across transects. The unlogged study site possessed the highest species richness, diversity, and evenness, and had the greatest frequency of species encounters. The most heavily logged site had the lowest species diversity and fewest amount of species encounters. This site also had the most dissimilar species composition among sites and was significantly different in species richness compared to the unlogged site. The two moder- ately logged sites had the second and third most species, and had the most similar species composition to each other. Our study provides data on the amphibian species of a protected site in the Albertine Rift, part of the Eastern Afromontane biodiversity hotspot, and results suggest that the forest management regimes in Budongo have exerted an influence over the amphibian communities after more than 50 years of forest recovery. 1. Introduction At a time when all biodiversity is increasingly threatened by human activities (Kolbert, 2014), some groups of organisms are experiencing more severe losses than others are (Dirzo et al., 2014). Amphibians, in particular, are in one the most salient and rapid declines among ver- tebrates (Wake & Vredenburg, 2008; Jetz & Pyron, 2018). Many factors have coalesced to erode amphibian diversity, such as globalization and disease (Scheele et al., 2019), but some aspects of amphibian declines remain enigmatic (Catenazzi, 2015). Population studies on how am- phibian communities respond to environmental change will help tease apart the causative factors underlying global declines and will also provide evidence-based policies to help conserve wild species (Conde et al., 2019). However, amphibians—like most biodiversity—suffer from a lack of basic research into their population and conservation biology (Howard & Bickford, 2014). Data gaps for biodiversity exhibit extreme biases geographically (Gumbs et al., 2018; Meiri & Chapple, 2016), especially in the tropics (Stroud & Thompson, 2019). In Africa, it is widely recognized that there is a dire need for baseline research for amphibians (Nori et al., 2018), particularly for herpetofauna in the Afrotropical realm (Tingley et al., 2016; Tolley et al., 2016). Conse- quently, if we want to understand the conservation outlook for am- phibians, we need to collect baseline data in the Afrotropics with the aim to better understand the affect that anthropogenic activities have on species, populations, and communities. Forest-dwelling amphibians are particularly sensitive to changes because of human-induced transformations (Blaustein et al., 1994). Anthropogenic factors affecting amphibian populations range from the obvious—habitat destruction—to the opaque—natural resource man- agement practices—where some activities have indirect impacts, or the results are context dependent. Timber harvesting is one such manage- ment activity for which the results can be mixed, such that both positive and negative impacts have been observed for aspects of amphibian communities (deMaynadier & Hunter, 1995). Consequently, the land- management philosophy adopted by forest managers will influence the survival and persistence of the amphibian communities they oversee https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2019.117809 Received 3 October 2019; Received in revised form 29 November 2019; Accepted 30 November 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: hughesd@carnegiemnh.org (D.F. Hughes). Forest Ecology and Management 458 (2020) 117809 0378-1127/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. T