Effects of deforestation on multitaxa community similarity in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Habitat loss can lead to biotic homogenization (decrease in β diversity) or differentiation (increase in β diversity) of biological communities. However, it is unclear which of these ecological processes predominates in human-modified landscapes. We used data on vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants to quantify β diversity based on species occurrence and abundance among communities in 1367 landscapes with varying amounts of habitat (<30%, 30-60%, or >60% of forest cover) throughout the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Principles for area-based biodiversity conservation.

Recent international agreements have strengthened and expanded commitments to protect and restore native habitats for biodiversity protection ("area-based biodiversity conservation"). Nevertheless, biodiversity conservation is hindered because how such commitments should be implemented has been strongly debated, which can lead to suboptimal habitat protection decisions. We argue that, despite the debates, there are three essential principles for area-based biodiversity conservation.

Testing and optimizing metabarcoding of iDNA from dung beetles to sample mammals in the hyperdiverse Neotropics.

Over the past few years, insects have been used as samplers of vertebrate diversity by assessing the ingested-derived DNA (iDNA), and dung beetles have been shown to be a good mammal sampler given their broad feeding preference, wide distribution and easy sampling. Here, we tested and optimized the use of iDNA from dung beetles to assess the mammal community by evaluating if some biological and methodological aspects affect the use of dung beetles as mammal species samplers. We collected 403 dung beetles from 60 pitfall traps.

Propagating variational model uncertainty for bioacoustic call label smoothing.

Along with propagating the input toward making a prediction, Bayesian neural networks also propagate uncertainty. This has the potential to guide the training process by rejecting predictions of low confidence, and recent variational Bayesian methods can do so without Monte Carlo sampling of weights. Here, we apply sample-free methods for wildlife call detection on recordings made via passive acoustic monitoring equipment in the animals' natural habitats.

Climate-driven variation in dispersal ability predicts responses to forest fragmentation in birds.

Species sensitivity to forest fragmentation varies latitudinally, peaking in the tropics. A prominent explanation for this pattern is that historical landscape disturbance at higher latitudes has removed fragmentation-sensitive species or promoted the evolution of more resilient survivors. However, it is unclear whether this so-called extinction filter is the dominant driver of geographic variation in fragmentation sensitivity, particularly because climatic factors may also cause latitudinal gradients in dispersal ability, a key trait mediating sensitivity to habitat fragmentation.

Automated acoustic detection of Geoffroy's spider monkey highlights tipping points of human disturbance.

As more land is altered by human activity and more species become at risk of extinction, it is essential that we understand the requirements for conserving threatened species across human-modified landscapes. Owing to their rarity and often sparse distributions, threatened species can be difficult to study and efficient methods to sample them across wide temporal and spatial scales have been lacking. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is increasingly recognized as an efficient method for collecting data on vocal species; however, the development of automated species detectors required to analyse large amounts of acoustic data is not keeping pace.

The suggestion that landscapes should contain 40% of forest cover lacks evidence and is problematic.

A recent review suggests that forest cover needs to be restored or maintained on at least 40% of land area. In the absence of empirical evidence to support this threshold, we discuss how this suggestion is unhelpful and potentially dangerous. We advocate for regionally defined thresholds to inform conservation and restoration.

The magnitude and extent of edge effects on vascular epiphytes across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Edge effects are ubiquitous landscape processes influencing over 70% of forest cover worldwide. However, little is known about how edge effects influence the vertical stratification of communities in forest fragments. We combined a spatially implicit and a spatially explicit approach to quantify the magnitude and extent of edge effects on canopy and understorey epiphytic plants in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Disentangling the effects of sampling scale and size on the shape of species abundance distributions.

Many authors have tried to explain the shape of the species abundance distribution (SAD). Some of them have suggested that sampling spatial scale is an important factor shaping SADs. These suggestions, however, did not consider the indirect and well-known effect of sample size, which increases as samples are combined to generate SADs at larger spatial scales.

Support for the habitat amount hypothesis from a global synthesis of species density studies.

Decades of research suggest that species richness depends on spatial characteristics of habitat patches, especially their size and isolation. In contrast, the habitat amount hypothesis predicts that (1) species richness in plots of fixed size (species density) is more strongly and positively related to the amount of habitat around the plot than to patch size or isolation; (2) habitat amount better predicts species density than patch size and isolation combined, (3) there is no effect of habitat fragmentation per se on species density and (4) patch size and isolation effects do not become stronger with declining habitat amount. Data on eight taxonomic groups from 35 studies around the world support these predictions.

Extinction filters mediate the global effects of habitat fragmentation on animals.

Habitat loss is the primary driver of biodiversity decline worldwide, but the effects of fragmentation (the spatial arrangement of remaining habitat) are debated. We tested the hypothesis that forest fragmentation sensitivity-affected by avoidance of habitat edges-should be driven by historical exposure to, and therefore species' evolutionary responses to disturbance. Using a database containing 73 datasets collected worldwide (encompassing 4489 animal species), we found that the proportion of fragmentation-sensitive species was nearly three times as high in regions with low rates of historical disturbance compared with regions with high rates of disturbance (i.

Edge effects on trophic cascades in tropical rainforests.

The cascading effects of biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning of forests have become more apparent. However, how edge effects shape these processes has yet to be established. We assessed how edge effects alter arthropod populations and the strength of any resultant trophic cascades on herbivory rate in tropical forests of Brazil.

Relationship between conservation biology and ecology shown through machine reading of 32,000 articles.

Conservation biology was founded on the idea that efforts to save nature depend on a scientific understanding of how it works. It sought to apply ecological principles to conservation problems. We investigated whether the relationship between these fields has changed over time through machine reading the full texts of 32,000 research articles published in 16 ecology and conservation biology journals.

How should we store avian faecal samples for microbiota analyses? Comparing efficacy and cost-effectiveness.

Analyses of bacterial DNA in faecal samples are becoming ever more common, yet we still do not know much about bird microbiomes. These challenges partly lie in the unique chemical nature of their faeces, and in the choice of sample storage method, which affects DNA preservation and the resulting microbiome composition. However, there is little information available on how best to preserve avian faeces for microbial analyses.

Mediation of area and edge effects in forest fragments by adjacent land use.

Habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation have pervasive detrimental effects on tropical forest biodiversity, but the role of the surrounding land use (i.e., matrix) in determining the severity of these impacts remains poorly understood.

Publisher Correction: Distance to range edge determines sensitivity to deforestation.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Distance to range edge determines sensitivity to deforestation.

It is generally assumed that deforestation affects a species consistently across space, however populations near their geographic range edge may exist at their niche limits and therefore be more sensitive to disturbance. We found that both within and across Atlantic Forest bird species, populations are more sensitive to deforestation when near their range edge. In fact, the negative effects of deforestation on bird occurrences switched to positive in the range core (>829 km), in line with Ellenberg's rule.

ATLANTIC BIRDS: a data set of bird species from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

South America holds 30% of the world's avifauna, with the Atlantic Forest representing one of the richest regions of the Neotropics. Here we have compiled a data set on Brazilian Atlantic Forest bird occurrence (150,423) and abundance samples (N = 832 bird species; 33,119 bird individuals) using multiple methods, including qualitative surveys, mist nets, point counts, and line transects). We used four main sources of data: museum collections, on-line databases, literature sources, and unpublished reports.

Trait-based indicators of bird species sensitivity to habitat loss are effective within but not across data sets.

Species' traits have been widely championed as the key to predicting which species are most threatened by habitat loss, yet previous work has failed to detect trends that are consistent enough to guide large-scale conservation and management. Here we explore whether traits and environmental variables predict species sensitivity to habitat loss across two data sets generated by independent avifaunal studies in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil, both of which detected a similar assemblage of species, and similar species-specific responses to habitat change, across an overlapping sample of sites. Specifically, we tested whether 25 distributional, climatic, ecological, behavioral, and morphological variables predict sensitivity to habitat loss among 196 bird species, both within and across studies, and when data were analysed as occurrence or abundance.

Atlantic forest bird communities provide different but not fewer functions after habitat loss.

Habitat loss often reduces the number of species as well as functional diversity. Dramatic effects to species composition have also been shown, but changes to functional composition have so far been poorly documented, partly owing to a lack of appropriate indices. We here develop three new community indices (i.