What makes a successful species? Traits facilitating survival in altered tropical forests

Abstract

BackgroundOngoing conversion, disturbance and fragmentation of tropical forests stress this ecosystem and cause the decline or disappearance of many species. Particular traits have been identified which indicate an increasing extinction risk of a species, but traits facilitating survival in altered habitats have mostly been neglected. Here we search for traits that make a species tolerant to disturbances, thus independent of pristine forests. We identify the fauna that have an increasing effect on the ecosystem and its functioning in our human-dominated landscapes.MethodsWe use a unique set of published data on the occurrences of 243 frog species in pristine and altered forests throughout the tropics. We established a forest dependency index with four levels, based on these occurrence data and applied Random Forest classification and binomial Generalized Linear Models to test whether species life history traits, ecological traits or range size influence the likelihood of a species to persist in disturbed habitats.ResultsOur results revealed that indirect developing species exhibiting a large range size and wide elevational distribution, being independent of streams, and inhabiting the leaf litter, cope best with modifications of their natural habitats.ConclusionThe traits identified in our study will likely persist in altered tropical forest systems and are comparable to those generally recognized for a low species extinction risk. Hence our findings will help to predict future frog communities in our human-dominated world.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12898-017-0135-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Evolutionarily distinct amphibians are disproportionately lost from human‐modified ecosystems

“…There is evidence that land conversion functionally homogenises amphibian assemblages (Ernst et al . ; Trimble & van Aarde ), which is logical given that susceptible species tend to share certain traits (Hirschfeld & Rödel ; Nowakowski et al . ).…”

“…These patterns raise the question of what consequences will the loss of evolutionarily distinct amphibians from converted habitats have for ecosystem integrity and function? There is evidence that land conversion functionally homogenises amphibian assemblages (Ernst et al 2006;Trimble & van Aarde 2014), which is logical given that susceptible species tend to share certain traits (Hirschfeld & R€ odel 2017;Nowakowski et al 2017). Although there is some empirical evidence that evolutionarily isolated species have more distinctive suites of traits (e.g.…”

Evaluating the predicted extinction risk of living amphibian species with the fossil record

“…(), Cooper et al . () and Hirschfeld & Rödel (), who found geographic range size to be of most importance for the extinction risk of extant amphibian species. The importance of geographic range measures is also accounted for in the rating procedures and threat categories within the IUCN assessment process of species (IUCN ).…”

“…The data for 1382 living species were collected using the IUCN Red List, AmphibiaWeb and the literature. The number of species here was limited by the availability of body size data, which were collected as snout‐vent‐length from Hirschfeld & Rödel (), Trochet et al . (), Ruland & Jeschke () and AmphibiaWeb ().…”

“…; Sodhi et al . ; Hirschfeld & Rödel ), and partly used to predict species’ extinction risk (Howard & Bickford ).…”