Abstract
Tropical rainforests are suffering rapid habitat loss with large extensions of land transformed into agriculture. We wanted to know whether the type of agricultural activity in forest-agricultural landscapes affects how species composition as well as taxonomic and functional dimensions of diversity respond. We worked in the Amazon forests of southeast Peru and used bats as model organisms. We sampled mosaics characterized by forest adjacent to papaya plantations or cattle pastures. At each sampling site we established a transect in each of the three different vegetation types: forest interior, forest edge and agricultural land. We found that vegetation type was a better predictor of species composition than the type of agricultural land present. Vegetation structure characteristics explained differences in bat species composition between forest interior and edge. Agricultural land type chosen was not irrelevant as we found higher estimated species richness in papaya than in pasture sites. Agricultural land type present in a site and vegetation type affected functional diversity, with both agricultural land types showing a lower number of functionally distinct species than forests. We found papaya plantation sites showed species more evenly dispersed in trait space, suggesting they do better at conserving functional diversity when compared to cattle pasture sites. We demonstrate that sites that harbor agricultural activities can maintain a considerable proportion of the expected bat diversity. We note that this region still has large tracts of intact forest adjacent to agricultural lands, which may explain their ability to maintain relatively high levels bat diversity.
Highlights
In the era of the Anthropocene [1] human activities are affecting biological diversity globally [2].Exploitation of natural resources, deforestation, and land-use change are among the most important drivers of habitat loss and reduction of biodiversity [3,4]
We examined the degree to which vegetation structure and temperature variation explained the variation found in bat species composition using non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analysis between forest interiors and forest edges
We collected 29 specimens that could not be identified in the field, which were deposited in the collection of the Centro de Ecología y Biodiversidad (CEBIO) in Lima, Peru
Summary
Exploitation of natural resources, deforestation, and land-use change are among the most important drivers of habitat loss and reduction of biodiversity [3,4]. These changes have negative consequences for ecosystems and people that depend on these ecosystems due to the loss of ecological function and services [5,6]. These negative impacts are perhaps nowhere more pressing than in highly biodiverse regions such as the tropics. Agriculture generally has Diversity 2020, 12, 238; doi:10.3390/d12060238 www.mdpi.com/journal/diversity
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