Long-term monitoring reveals widespread and severe declines of understory birds in a protected Neotropical forest.

ABSTRACT: Long-term studies on the population dynamics of tropical resident birds are few, and it remains poorly understood how their populations have fared in recent decades. Here, we analyzed a 44-y population study of a Neotropical understory bird assemblage from a protected forest reserve in central Panama to determine if and how populations have changed from 1977 to 2020. Using the number of birds captured in mist nets as an index of local abundance, we estimated trends over time for a diverse suite of 57 resident species that comprised a broad range of ecological and behavioral traits. Estimated abundances of 40 (∼70%) species declined over the sampling period, whereas only 2 increased. Furthermore, declines were severe: 35 of the 40 declining species exhibited large proportional losses in est

SUBMITTER: Pollock HS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9169736 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature