Time-Lag in Responses of Birds to Atlantic Forest Fragmentation: Restoration Opportunity and Urgency.

ABSTRACT: There are few opportunities to evaluate the relative importance of landscape structure and dynamics upon biodiversity, especially in highly fragmented tropical landscapes. Conservation strategies and species risk evaluations often rely exclusively on current aspects of landscape structure, although such limited assumptions are known to be misleading when time-lag responses occur. By relating bird functional-group richness to forest patch size and isolation in ten-year intervals (1956, 1965, 1978, 1984, 1993 and 2003), we revealed that birds with different sensitivity to fragmentation display contrasting responses to landscape dynamics in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. For non-sensitive groups, there was no time-lag in response: the recent degree of isolation best explains their variation i

SUBMITTER: Uezu A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4731062 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature