The past 40 years in Southeast Asia have seen about 50% of lowland rainforests converted to oil palm and other plantations, and much of the remaining forest heavily logged. Little is known about how fragmentation influences recovery and whether climate change will hamper restoration. Here, we use repeat airborne LiDAR surveys spanning the hot and dry 2015-16 El Niño Southern Oscillation event to measure canopy height growth across 3,300 ha of regenerating tropical forests spanning a logging intensity gradient in Malaysian Borneo. We show that the drought led to increased leaf shedding and branch fall. Short forest, regenerating after heavy logging, continued to grow despite higher evaporative demand, except when it was located close to oil palm plantations. Edge effects from the plantations extended over 300 metres into the forests. Forest growth on hilltops and slopes was particularly impacted by the combination of fragmentation and drought, but even riparian forests located within 40 m of oil palm plantations lost canopy height during the drought. Our results suggest that small patches of logged forest within plantation landscapes will be slow to recover, particularly as ENSO events are becoming more frequent.

Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science Arizona State University Tempe AZ and Hilo Tempe HI USA

Department of Forest Botany Dendrology and Geobiocoenology Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology Mendel University in Brno 613 00 Brno Czech Republic

Department of Forest Ecology Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences Czech University of Life Sciences Prague Kamýcká 129 Prague 165 00 Czech Republic

Department of Geosciences and Geography University of Helsinki Helsinki 00014 Finland

Department of Life Sciences Imperial College London Silwood Park Campus Buckhurst Road Ascot Berkshire SL5 7PY UK

Department of Plant Sciences and Conservation Research Institute University of Cambridge Cambridge CB2 3QZ UK

Sabah Forestry Department Sandakan 90009 Malaysia

School of Biological Sciences University of Bristol Bristol BS8 1TH UK

School of Geography and the Environment Environmental Change Institute University of Oxford Oxford OX1 3QY UK

School of Natural Sciences Bangor University Gwynedd LL57 2UW UK

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