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The article presents a case study on the impact of the reduced-impact logging (RIL), conventional logging (CL), and primary (unlogged) forests on birds, dung beetles, and leaf-litter ants in Sabah, Borneo. Unlogged forests significantly differed to RIL and CL based to the composition of bird and ant species. Result shows that the biodiversity from RIL and CL have a difference in a short time, but its benefits may fall over the longer time after the cessation of logging.

Abstract: Designing conservation areas entails costs that, if considered explicitly, can be minimized while still achieving conservation targets. Here we focus on opportunity costs which measure forgone benefits from alternative land uses. Conservation planning studies often use partial estimates of costs, but the extent to which these result in actual efficiencies has not been demonstrated. Our study partitions land costs into three distinct opportunity costs to smallholder agriculture, soybean agriculture and ranching. We demonstrate that opportunity costs to single stakeholder groups can be inaccurate measures of true opportunity costs and can inadvertently shift conservation costs to affect groups of stakeholders disproportionately. Additionally, we examine how spatial correlations between costs as well as target size affect the performance of opportunity costs to single stakeholder groups as surrogate measures of true opportunity costs. We conclude that planning with opportunity costs to single stakeholder groups can result in cost burdens to other groups that could undermine the long-term success of conservation. Thus, an understanding of the spatial distributions of opportunity costs that are disaggregated to groups of stakeholders is necessary to make informed decisions about priority conservation areas. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]