High sensitivity of tropical forest birds to deforestation at lower altitudes.

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 for

SUBMITTER: Mills SC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10078351 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature