Journal
ECOLOGY
Volume 96, Issue 6, Pages 1670-1680Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1890/14-1333.1
Keywords
abundance; community ecology; density; distribution; forest bird species; habitat selection; landscape-scale experiment; population ecology; predation; species turnover; vegetation gradient; western Montana, USA
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Funding
- Bair Foundation
- Lewis and Clark National Forest
- U.S. Geological Survey Climate Change Research Program
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) [FP-91747701-0]
- University of Montana IACUC protocol AUP [059-10]
- Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks [2009-023, 2010-044, 2011-045, 2012-042, 2013-090]
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Turnover in animal species along vegetation gradients is often assumed to reflect adaptive habitat preferences that are narrower than the full gradient. Specifically, animals may decline in abundance where their reproductive success is low, and these poor-quality locations differ among species. Yet habitat use does not always appear adaptive. The crucial tests of how abundances and demographic costs of animals vary along experimentally manipulated vegetation gradients are lacking. We examined habitat use and nest predation rates for 16 bird species that exhibited turnover with shifts in deciduous and coniferous vegetation. For most bird species, decreasing abundance was associated with increasing predation rates along both natural and experimentally modified vegetation gradients. This landscape-scale approach strongly supports the idea that vegetation-mediated effects of predation are associated with animal distributions and species turnover.
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