The present study aimed to assess the influence of human activity on forest species composition. Using Generalized Dissimilarity Models and accounting for local variables of forest accessibility it used a considerable data set (66 plots and over 28000 occurrences of trees) in a region that unfortunately is yet understudied. Similar work have investigated this in smaller spatial scales and this work aimed to improve the representativeness of the hypothesis of influence of human activity in forest assemblages. Thus this study is a great contribution to understanding the ecology and species distribution of forests of Nigeria and Cameroon.

The introduction is well-written, easy to read, and with enough references to sustain the hypothesis and methods. The results and discussion are detailed and the limitations of the study are clear.

I made some minor comments along the text; I only want more clarification on the lack of climate and soil variables in the work.

Overall I congratulate the authors and think that this work should be published in the journal.

Minor comments:

page 8 lines 12-13 which figure is that? Is it figure 1?
Page 8 line 33 - how many plots are in each cluster? Cluster 1 seems to have very few plots. I continued reading and found the information. Maybe bring it up here for clarity. Also, the clusters have a very different number of plots. Should the clusters be kept?

Page 10 line 10-12 - Can remove the sentence "all other plots that did not..." it is repetitive.

page 12 - GDM - in the environmental variables, considering that the clusters are ca. 400km apart, shouldn't you have considered differences in soil type, or climate variables such as total rainfall and temperature? If not, an explanation should be included as to why these environmental variables were not included, since they are relevant for forest composition.

I continued reading and saw that in the discussion, on page 21 you add a line stating that climate could explain the differences. And then again on page 25 mentioning the limitations of the study. Maybe it is worth finding climate data for the regions and adding them to the work to support the discussion. If not, explain why you choose not to include climate variables.

page 22 - You discuss that forest composition predicted total beta diversity. Are there limitations to these assumptions considering that only 12 of the 66 plots were monodominant?

page 23 - When you mention a species name for the first time in a text, you should also include their author's name.

page 26 - the last paragraph could be moved up to line 38 of the previous page when you mention the lack of climate variables. Just to improve the order of the ideas. The way it is you are going back and forth instead of saying everything about the climate at once.

The authors have addressed all my concerns.