Bird Occupancy of a Neotropical Forest Fragment Is Mostly Stable over 17 Years but Influenced by Forest Age

Seasonality of Reproduction in a Neotropical Rain Forest Bird

Tropical wet forests are commonly perceived as stable and constant environments. However, many rain forest organisms reproduce seasonally. To understand the proximate regulation of life history events in tropical organisms, we asked three questions: (1) How predictable are seasonal changes in the tropical rain forest? (2) Can tropical organisms anticipate environmental seasonality, despite the ...

Associations of forest cover, fragment area, and connectivity with neotropical understory bird species richness and abundance.

Theoretical and empirical studies demonstrate that the total amount of forest and the size and connectivity of fragments have nonlinear effects on species survival. We tested how habitat amount and configuration affect understory bird species richness and abundance. We used mist nets (almost 34,000 net hours) to sample birds in 53 Atlantic Forest fragments in southeastern Brazil. Fragments were...

Is the effect of forest structure on bird diversity modified by forest productivity?

Currently, the most common strategy when managing forests for biodiversity at the landscape scale is to maintain structural complexity within stands and provide a variety of seral stages across landscapes. Advances in ecological theory reveal that biodiversity at continental scales is strongly influenced by available energy (i.e., climate factors relating to heat and light and primary productiv...

Short-Term Dynamics of a Neotropical Forest

Changes in Bird Communities in Boreal Mixedwood Forest: Harvest and Wildfire Effects over 30 Years

A current paradigm in conservation biology is that forest harvest practices that better approximate natural disturbance processes are more likely to conserve biodiversity. We contrasted bird communities in three replicate stands in each of 1, 13–15, and 22–28 yr old forests following wildfire and harvest in north-central Alberta, Canada. Stands were chosen from old (.120 yr) boreal mixedwood fo...