The Pacific coast of Central America has been impacted by humans and most of its forests have disappeared. However, patches still remain of forested areas where we find flora representative of what might have been before humans settled in the region. El Salvador, the most deforested country in the Western Hemisphere, contains small fragments of forests that house a relatively diverse community of trees. We conducted forest inventories in three sites (2.8 ha) within El Imposible National Park. Our main objective was to determine the state of the tree community after human disturbance: two areas where selective tree harvesting occurred ( Site 1 & 3) and an abandoned coffee plantation (Site 2, all events 18 years ago). In each site, we established permanent plots (20 x 50 m) and included all woody stems equal or greater than 5 cm DBH. We measured DBH (cm), height (m), x,y-coordinates, and nearest neighbor distances. This report is based upon Sites 1 & 2. We identified 103/ha species in site 1 and 110/0.8 ha in site 2. The dominant species in site 1 is Brosimum alicastrum (Moraceae, I.V.=30.59) and in site 2, the dominant species is Alstonia longifolia(Apocynaceae, I.V.=38.7). Interestingly, the abandoned coffee plantation has about one third more woody species (138/ha) than the site selectively cut. At both sites, about 33% of the species occur as a single tree, resulting in steep species-area curves. In site 1 the counts are not randomly distributed (index of dispersion of 2.2, P=0.02 in 999 Monte Carlo simulations of CSR); however there is no spatial autocorrelation of these trees (P=04 in Mantel test). We conclude that regardless of the human disturbance suffered by these forests and the little disturbance thereafter, this area still contains a diverse tree species diversity.

Key words: El Imposible National Park, El Salvador, forest fragments, forest inventory, tropical tree diversity