Tropical Bird Communities
نویسندگان
چکیده
Tropical ecosystems harbor the world’s greatest diversity of avian species. Latitudinal patterns of climate and productivity, alongside historical factors, have been evoked to explain such characteristics, and there is increasing knowledge that the complex ecological interactions found in the tropical zone play a very important role in this process, regulating competition and allowing an increase in niche differentiation. As a result, several particular ecological specializations arise in these ecosystems, such as exclusive exploitation of resources that are mostly seasonal in temperate zones, such as fruits, or of resources not available in the higher latitudes, such as army ants. Less understood and recognized, however, are the considerable differences within tropical ecosystems regarding avian communities. Ecological interactions within these communities can be extremely different from one another, and these differences are crucial to the understanding of the processes that result in variances in diversity. Finally, human influence in these communities has been occurring for centuries, and still plays a major role in shaping present characteristics. It is important to recognize that, due to tropical biome particularities and to the evolutionary history that birds have been experiencing under these particularities, this influence is not a modified version of that which occurs in temperate biomes, and that the same actions may have very different impacts on different taxonomic groups and in different biomes.
منابع مشابه
Oecologia (Berl
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