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We examined whether and how woody debris removal for domestic fuel affects carbon storage and soil properties in an Indian rainforest. Fuelwood removal reduced aboveground carbon stocks, increased soil bulk density, and possibly reduced soil phosphorus stocks. Equitably balancing this subtle trade‐off between climate‐regulating and vital, widely utilized provisioning functions, is a challenge for tropical forest research and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: How seasonal drought influences tree species distributions might shape future vegetation composition with impending changes to rainfall patterns. Theory suggests that across a seasonal drought gradient, dry‐tolerant species might have wider distributions than species sensitive to seasonal drought, which will be restricted to less seasonal conditions. As wet‐associated species drop out with increasing seasonality, the community will contain mainly dry‐tolerant species. Time period: Present. Location: Western Ghats Biodiversity Hotspot in peninsular India. Major taxa studied: Woody angiosperms. Methods: Across a 1,200 km seasonal drought gradient, we modelled occurrences of 183 species using Gaussian logistic regression in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. We used the first‐order model coefficients to attribute the association of species to seasonality (dry/wet) and second‐order coefficients to assess modal responses. For 92 species, we checked for an interaction between dry/wet association and two traits: wood density and specific leaf area (SLA). Finally, we assessed the consequences of the seasonality associations of species for regional community assembly. Results: Of 183 species, 38% were significantly wet associated, 27% dry associated and 34% indifferent to seasonality. Nearly 80% of species had estimated modes of occurrence within the seasonality range considered here. Species with lower SLA and lower wood density were more likely to occur in more seasonal sites where dry‐associated species formed the majority of co‐occurring species. The proportion of wet‐associated species increased only after intermediate levels of seasonality. The community proportion of extreme wet‐associated species decreased prominently from less to more seasonal sites. Main conclusions: Dry‐associated species persisted in less seasonal sites, but not vice versa. A shift toward more seasonal rainfall might favour dry‐associated species and shrink the ranges of wet‐associated species. Future work should assess how the intensity and duration of drought and interactions with other drivers of global change regulate the relative performance of species at more and less seasonal sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tropical forests are among the largest terrestrial reservoirs of carbon, and play an important role in regulating global climate. However, as a result of historic and ongoing deforestation, carbon storage in this biome is increasingly dependent on forests that are fragmented and used by humans, with considerable uncertainty about how such disturbance alters carbon storage potential and cycling. Here, we evaluate differences in above-ground carbon stocks between fragmented and contiguous evergreen forests in the central Western Ghats, India. We also assess differences in the structure, tree allometry and functional composition of forest stands between contiguous and fragmented forests, and explore how these differences influence carbon storage in fragmented forests. Relatively large, well-protected forest fragments currently store 40% less carbon per hectare above ground than contiguous forests. These differences in carbon are related to (i) lower tree density and basal area in fragments, (ii) lower average stand height in fragments, and (iii) compositional shifts favoring species with lower wood densities. Reduced stand height in fragments was associated with intra-specific variation in tree allometry, with trees in fragments being relatively shorter at any given diameter than conspecifics in contiguous forests. Further, the relatively skewed distribution of carbon storage within a few large trees in current-day fragments is added cause for concern: carbon stocks in fragments are likely to decline further in the future, following the eventual death of large trees. Active management and restoration to mitigate ecologically driven changes in habitat structure and species composition might be as important as improved management of resource use and protection from exploitation in order to sustain carbon storage ecosystem services provided by these tropical forest fragments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the potential for community-conserved areas (CCAs) to extend conservation beyond formal protected areas is widely acknowledged, the scarcity of conservation assessments and monitoring hinders the rigorous evaluation of their effectiveness in many regions. In India, which hosts a high density and diversity of CCAs, the need for more assessments of the ecological and socio-economic properties of these systems to guide conservation planning and policy has been emphasised in recent years. We inventoried the extant sacred grove network against official records of 407 groves across 70 villages in the Kodagu District of India’s Western Ghats, and interviewed local communities about their management and conservation. We also evaluated recent trends in aboveground biomass of sacred groves using time-series satellite data from six time-points during the 2000–2010 period, and made comparisons to corresponding trends in nearby State-managed protected forests. Although most of the larger (>2 ha) groves officially listed were forested at present, over two-thirds of the smaller groves listed were either not forested or could not be located. Local communities attributed these declines to encroachment and illicit logging. Time-series satellite data revealed aboveground biomass declines of ∼0.5% annually across the sacred grove network over the 2000–2010 period. In contrast, biomass increased during this period at the interiors and edges of State-managed forests in the landscape. Our results highlight that the conservation status of even well-protected CCAs can vary considerably over time, especially given the dynamism in socio-economic, cultural and ecological factors that govern their status. We argue that understanding and addressing this dynamism is crucial to the conservation of CCAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]