Journal
PLOS ONE
Volume 11, Issue 11, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0163338
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) [G.0258.01N, G.0055.08N, G.0149.09N, G.0308.13N]
- Flemish Interuniversity Council [02/6/7-338-607]
- FWO research community [WO.037.10N]
- Natural Environment Research Council [NE/I028068/1]
- Polish National Science Centre [NCN 2014/13/B/NZ8/04681]
- Natural Environment Research Council [NE/I028068/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- NERC [NE/I028068/1] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Rapid fragmentation and degradation of large undisturbed habitats constitute major threats to biodiversity. Several studies have shown that populations in small and highly isolated habitat patches are prone to strong environmental and demographic stochasticity and increased risk of extinction. Based on community assembly theory, we predict recent rapid forest fragmentation to cause a decline in species and functional guild richness of forest birds combined with a high species turnover among habitat patches, and well defined dominance structures, if competition is the major driver of community assembly. To test these predictions, we analysed species co-occurrence, nestedness, and competitive strength to infer effects of interspecific competition, habitat structure, and species' traits on the assembly of bird species communities from 12 cloud forest fragments in southern Kenya. Our results do not point to a single ecological driver of variation in species composition. Interspecific competition does not appear to be a major driver of species segregation in small forest patches, while its relative importance appears to be higher in larger ones, which may be indicative for a generic shift from competition-dominated to colonisation-driven community structure with decreasing fragment size. Functional trait diversity was independent of fragment size after controlling for species richness. As fragmentation effects vary among feeding guilds and habitat generalists, in particular, tend to decline in low quality forest patches, we plead for taking species ecology fully into account when predicting tropical community responses to habitat change.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available