Effect of fragmentation on the Costa Rican dry forest avifauna
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
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Abstract
Deforestation and land use change have reduced the tropical dry forest in the northwestern region of Costa Rica into isolated fragments. We examined the effect of fragment area and length of the dry season (seasonality) on nestedness for the community (entire species matrix), assemblages (forest fragments), and species occupancy across fragments for the native avifauna, and for a subset of forest dependent species. Area or distance between fragments did not correlate with species richness across fragments. Similarity in bird community composition between fragments was related with habitat structure; fragments with similar forest structure have higher similarity in their avifaunas. Fragment area determined the pattern of nestedness of the bird community and species occupancy, but not the nestedness of assemblages across fragments in northwestern Costa Rican avifauna. Forest dependent species (species that require large tracts of mature forest) and assemblages of these species were nested along forest fragments ranked by seasonality gradient, but only occupancy of species nested by fragment area.
Cite this as
2016. Effect of fragmentation on the Costa Rican dry forest avifauna. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1970v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1970v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
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This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
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Supplemental Information
Checklist of resident bird species in five dry forest fragments in northwestern Costa Rica
Table S1. Checklist of resident bird species recorded in five dry forest fragments in northwestern Costa Rica: SR – Santa Rosa, PV – Palo Verde, RV – Rincón de la Vieja, Dir – Diriá, CB – Cabo Blanco.
R script for Lomolino function
R script for the Lomolino function.
Additional Information
Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Gilbert Barrantes conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper, bird surveys.
Diego Ocampo conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper, bird surveys.
José D. Ramírez-Fernández conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper, bird surveys.
Eric J Fuchs analyzed the data, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
The raw data has been supplied as a Supplemental Dataset.
Funding
The authors received no funding for this work.
