Sacred forests are keystone structures for forest bird conservation in southwest China's Himalayan Mountains

Identifying and protecting keystone structures is essential to maintain biodiversity in an increasingly human-dominated world. Sacred forests, i.e. natural areas protected by local people for cultural or religious regions, may be keystone structures for forest birds in the Greater Himalayas, but there is limited understanding of their use by bird communities. We surveyed birds and their habitat in and adjacent to six Tibetan sacred forests in northwest Yunnan China, a biodiversity hotspot Our goal was to understand the ecological and conservation role of these remnant forest patches for forest birds. We found that sacred forests supported a different bird community than the surrounding matrix, and had higher bird species richness at plot, patch, and landscape scales. While we encountered a homogeneous matrix bird community outside the scared forests, the sacred forests themselves exhibited high heterogeneity, and supported at least two distinct bird communities. While bird community composition was primarily driven by the vegetation vertical structure, plots with the largest-diameter trees and native bamboo groves had the highest bird diversity, indicating that protecting forest ecosystems with old-growth characteristics is important for Himalayan forest birds. Finally, we found an increased bird use of the sacred forests and their edges during 2010, a severe drought year in Yunnan, indicating that sacred forests may serve as refuges during extreme weather years. Our results strongly indicate that sacred forests represent an important opportunity for Himalayan bird conservation because they protect a variety of habitat niches and increase bird diversity at multiple spatial scales. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.