Mills, SC, Socolar, JB, Edwards, FA et al. (7 more authors) (2023) High sensitivity of tropical forest birds to deforestation at lower altitudes. Ecology, 104 (1). e3867. ISSN 0012-9658
Abstract
Habitat conversion is a major driver of tropical biodiversity loss, but its effects are poorly understood in montane environments. While community-level responses to habitat loss display strong elevational dependencies, it is unclear whether these arise via elevational turnover in community composition and interspecific differences in sensitivity or elevational variation in environmental conditions and proximity to thermal thresholds. Here we assess the relative importance of inter- and intraspecific variation across the elevational gradient by quantifying how 243 forest-dependent bird species vary in sensitivity to landscape-scale forest loss across a 3000-m elevational gradient in the Colombian Andes. We find that species that live at lower elevations are strongly affected by loss of forest in the nearby landscape, while those at higher elevations appear relatively unperturbed, an effect that is independent of phylogeny. Conversely, we find limited evidence of intraspecific elevational gradients in sensitivity, with populations displaying similar sensitivities to forest loss, regardless of where they exist in a species' elevational range. Gradients in biodiversity response to habitat loss thus appear to arise via interspecific gradients in sensitivity rather than proximity to climatically limiting conditions.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
Keywords: | avian community; elevational gradients; forest conversion; montane tropics; tropical conservation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number NATURAL ENVIRONMENT RESEARCH COUNCIL NE/R017441/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 22 Nov 2022 10:15 |
Last Modified: | 25 Sep 2024 15:44 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/ecy.3867 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:193626 |