Impacts of habitat change and protected areas on alpha and beta diversity of Mexican birds

Hiley, Jonathan; Bradbury, Richard B.; Thomas, Chris D.

doi:10.1111/ddi.12483

Cited by 24 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Our results corroborate studies in temperate regions that found that protected areas do not protect all species and thus do not always affect species richness 6,36 . However, they contrast with what was known in the tropical regions based on two previous global-scale studies of protected area effectiveness, based on the meta-analysis of local-scale studies contrasting protected versus unprotected sites.…”

Section: Assessing Effectiveness In Tropical Forest Hotspotssupporting

confidence: 91%

Effectiveness of protected areas in conserving tropical forest birds

Cazalis

Princé

Mihoub

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Protected areas are the cornerstones of global biodiversity conservation efforts 1,2 , but to fulfil this role they must be effective at conserving the ecosystems and species that occur within their boundaries. This is particularly imperative in tropical forest hotspots, regions that concentrate a major fraction of the world's biodiversity while also being under intense human pressure 3-5 . But these areas strongly lack adequate monitoring datasets enabling to contrast biodiversity in protected areas with comparable unprotected sites 6,7 .Here we take advantage of the world's largest citizen science biodiversity dataset -eBird 8 -to quantify the extent to which protected areas in eight tropical forest biodiversity hotspots are effective at retaining bird diversity, and to understand the underlying mechanisms. We found generally positive effects of protection on the diversity of bird species that are forest-dependent, endemic to the hotspots, or threatened or Near Threatened, but not on overall bird species richness. Furthermore, we show that in most of the hotspots examined this is driven by protected areas preventing both forest loss and degradation.Our results support calls for increasing the extent and strengthening the management efforts within protected areas to reduce global biodiversity loss 9-11 .

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Section: Assessing Effectiveness In Tropical Forest Hotspotssupporting

confidence: 91%

Effectiveness of protected areas in conserving tropical forest birds

Cazalis

Princé

Mihoub

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…We cannot conclude that the colonization of novel plant habitats by unique taxa will increase overall regional diversity (e.g. Hiley, Bradbury, & Thomas, ; Sax & Gaines, ; Vellend et al, ), but our results imply that a mixture of longer standing and more novel plant habitats may retain diversity, albeit with a changed composition.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Introduced plants as novel Anthropocene habitats for insects

Padovani

Salisbury

Bostock

et al. 2019

Global Change Biology

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Major environmental changes in the history of life on Earth have given rise to novel habitats, which gradually accumulate species. Human‐induced change is no exception, yet the rules governing species accumulation in anthropogenic habitats are not fully developed. Here we propose that nonnative plants introduced to Great Britain may function as analogues of novel anthropogenic habitats for insects and mites, analysing a combination of local‐scale experimental plot data and geographic‐scale data contained within the Great Britain Database of Insects and their Food Plants. We find that novel plant habitats accumulate the greatest diversity of insect taxa when they are widespread and show some resemblance to plant habitats which have been present historically (based on the relatedness between native and nonnative plant species), with insect generalists colonizing from a wider range of sources. Despite reduced per‐plant diversity, nonnative plants can support distinctive insect communities, sometimes including insect taxa that are otherwise rare or absent. Thus, novel plant habitats may contribute to, and potentially maintain, broader‐scale (assemblage) diversity in regions that contain mixtures of long‐standing and novel plant habitats.

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“…Moreover, areas with low human-induced disturbance can have higher species richness than a pristine area, as predicted by the intermediate disturbance hypothes is (Roxburgh et al, 2004). Accordingly, Hiley et al, (2016) found lower alpha avian diversity in Mexican PAs than in unprotected areas. However, our results contrast with previous studies investigating this question such as Coetzee et al (2014) or Gray et al (2016), who found a positive effect of PAs on species richness and on summed abundance, including in North America (Coetzee et al, 2014).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Using a large-scale biodiversity monitoring dataset to test the effectiveness of protected areas at conserving North-American breeding birds

Cazalis

Belghali

Rodrigues

2018

Preprint

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Protected areas currently cover about 15% of the global land area, and constitute one of the main tools in biodiversity conservation. Quantifying their effectiveness at protecting species from local decline or extinction involves comparing protected with counterfactual unprotected sites representing "what would have happened to protected sites had they not been protected". Most studies are based on pairwise comparisons, using neighbour sites to protected areas as counterfactuals, but this choice is often subjective and may be prone to biases. An alternative is to use large-scale biodiversity monitoring datasets, whereby the effect of protected areas is analysed statistically by controlling for landscape differences between protected and unprotected sites, allowing a more targeted and clearly defined measure of the protected areas effect. Here we use the North American Breeding Bird Survey dataset as a case study to investigate the effectiveness of protected areas at conserving bird assemblages. We analysed the effect of protected areas on species richness, on assemblage-level abundance, and on the abundance of individual species by modelling how these metrics relate to the proportion of each site that is protected, while controlling for local habitat, altitude, productivity and for spatial autocorrelation. At the assemblage level, we found almost no relationship between protection and species richness or overall abundance. At the species level, we found that forest species are present in significantly higher abundances within protected forest sites, compared with unprotected forests, with the opposite effect for species that favour open habitats. Hence, even though protected forest assemblages are not richer than those of unprotected forests, they are more typical of this habitat. We also found some evidence that species that avoid human activities tend to be favoured by protection, but found no such effect for regionally declining species. Our results highlight the complexity of assessing protected areas effecti veness, and the necessity of clearly defining the metrics of effectiveness and the controls used in such assessments.

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Impacts of habitat change and protected areas on alpha and beta diversity of Mexican birds

Cited by 24 publications

References 36 publications

Effectiveness of protected areas in conserving tropical forest birds

Effectiveness of protected areas in conserving tropical forest birds

Introduced plants as novel Anthropocene habitats for insects

Using a large-scale biodiversity monitoring dataset to test the effectiveness of protected areas at conserving North-American breeding birds

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