Megan Sullivan’s study, conducted while a doctoral student at the Yale School of the Environment, offers insights on forest management that supports both conservation goals and local livelihoods.
Over 90% of Gabon is covered in dense tropical forests, making it the second most forested country in the world. As the country diversifies its economy beyond oil exports, low-intensity selective logging has become a source of economic growth, with about two-thirds of Gabon’s forested land leased to logging companies.
To find out how the logging is impacting forests, biodiversity and ecosystems services, Megan Sullivan ’23 PhD, spent more than a year conducting field work in Monts de Cristal National Park in northwestern Gabon. She set up 80 research plots to examine logging impacts on seedlings, saplings, and adult trees. What she found was that while low-intensity selective logging had modest impacts on the species composition of the forest, it didn’t appear to have negative impacts on key ecosystem services.
When done carefully — following best-practice management protocols and considering the context of forest cover and development in the country or region — low-intensity selective logging can be a compromise for sustainable development.”
The research, published in Global Ecology and Conservation, earned her the 2025 Bormann Prize at the Yale School of the Environment’s 41st annual Research Day. The prize is awarded to a doctoral student who produces a publication that best exemplifies the legacy of the late YSE Professor F. Herman Bormann. Bormann, a plant ecologist who called the world’s attention to the threat of acid rain, taught at YSE from 1966-1992.
“Ecological impacts of selective logging are unclear, with previous studies providing mixed results about whether and how selective logging alters forest structure, diversity, composition and function. Megan’s study is an excellent fit for the Bormann Prize. It creates new knowledge about the interplay between humans and the environment by shedding light on how forests can be used to aid in economic development while still maintaining high biodiversity and providing key ecosystem services,’’ said Liza Comita, the Davis-Denkmann Professor of Tropical Forest Ecology and co-director of the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture.
Sullivan, currently a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, said receiving the award for research that was part of her dissertation has encouraged her to continue focusing on applied research that aims to bridge ecological science and environmental decision-making.
She first became interested in studying logging while working as a research intern in Gabon after earning a bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from The Ohio State University.
“I had so many conversations with people about their forests. It’s a topic people were very passionate about and had many divergent opinions about. I was really inspired to study the impacts that logging was having on these ecosystems,” she said.
To collect the data, Sullivan and her team trekked for miles deep into the dense forests over hilly, roadless terrains — sometimes in the mud and pouring rain — and spent hours carefully crawling through undergrowth to measure seedling heights and trawling through tangles of tropical vines to measure the diameters of trees.
“It was difficult work, but I love the forests of Gabon,” she said. “There were long treks up and down hills, but also moments of real joy. One day, a chimpanzee played peekaboo with the field team as they were measuring a plot, popping out of the dense undergrowth onto a logging trail, and hooting to get our attention, before ducking back behind the branches.”
Her research results were also uplifting, she noted, having found that, if managed carefully, selective logging appears to limit negative impacts to forests while supporting sustainable land-use strategies and bolstering livelihoods and the economy.
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One surprising finding was that dispersed animal species increased in logged forests. That was not the case in other regions of the world, she said.
Sullivan’s study is part of a growing body of research in Gabon aimed at informing sustainable forest management. She hopes it will provide evidence to those who are skeptical of any kind of logging.
“When done carefully — following best-practice management protocols and considering the context of forest cover and development in the country or region — low-intensity selective logging can be a compromise for sustainable development,” she said. “It’s not about choosing one or the other. It’s about finding a path forward that supports both ecosystems and communities.”
Three additional students were honored on Research Day for their exemplary work: doctoral student Aishwarya Bhandari received the Schmitz Prize for best oral presentation for “Multi-Use Landscapes and Snow Leopard Conservation: A Case Study from Kyrgyzstan”; Ky Miller ’25 MESc earned the Master’s Student Oral Presentation Prize for the talk “In Defense of Life: Maya Ecoterritorial Struggles and Infrastructural Biopolitics on the Tracks of the ‘Maya Train’ Megaproject”; and Siria Gámez, a doctoral student, was awarded the Best Poster Presentation prize for creativity and clarity of visual communication in research for her poster “Canopy carnivores: drivers of vertical niche partitioning in a montane tropical forest reserve.”
