Effect of fragmentation on the Costa Rican dry forest avifauna
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Zoology
- Keywords
- Forest fragments, bird composition, nested community analysis, community similarity.
- Copyright
- © 2016 Barrantes et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Effect of fragmentation on the Costa Rican dry forest avifauna. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1970v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1970v1
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.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
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.