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Secondary and plantation forests are becoming increasingly widespread in the tropics. A recent meta‐analysis on the impacts of land‐use change on tropical forest dung beetles concluded that regenerating forests can be effective in helping to offset species loss following deforestation. However, our understanding of the extent to which these results can be generalized to new locations remains very poor.

We attempted to overcome many of the design limitations that characterize previous studies by collecting spatially independent dung beetle samples from primary, secondary and Eucalyptus plantation forests in north‐east Brazilian Amazonia across a large quasi‐experimental landscape that minimized confounding edge and fragmentation effects.

We recorded 9203 dung beetles, comprising 85 species. Species richness was significantly higher in primary forest and the majority of species were more …