Abstract
As tropical rainforests are cleared, forest remnants are increasingly isolated within agricultural landscapes. Understanding how forest loss impacts on species diversity can, therefore, contribute to identifying the minimum amount of habitat required for biodiversity maintenance in human-modified landscapes. Here, we evaluate how the amount of forest cover, at the landscape scale, affects patterns of species richness, abundance, key functional traits and common taxonomic families of adult trees in twenty Brazilian Atlantic rainforest landscapes. We found that as forest cover decreases, both tree community richness and abundance decline, without exhibiting a threshold. At the family-level, species richness and abundance of the Myrtaceae and Sapotaceae were also negatively impacted by the percent forest remaining at the landscape scale. For functional traits, we found a reduction in shade-tolerant, animal-dispersed and small-seeded species following a decrease in the amount of forest retained in landscapes. These results suggest that the amount of forest in a landscape is driving non-random losses in phylogenetic and functional tree diversity in Brazil’s remaining Atlantic rainforests. Our study highlights potential restraints on the conservation value of Atlantic rainforest remnants in deforested landscapes in the future.
Highlights
We are currently in the midst of a massive global extinction event [1], with the current wave of biodiversity reduction mainly occurring due to habitat loss and habitat modification [1,2]
Studies have shown that the synergistic effects of habitat loss and fragmentation lead to profound changes in patterns of tree species composition [3,4], richness [5,6,7], functional [8,9,10,11] and phylogenetic diversity [12,13,14,15], with landscape configuration and edge effects commonly identified as the key drivers of floristic decay in tropical rainforests
We investigated how tree community, families, and functional traits are affected by forest cover reduction in contrasting landscapes across the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest region
Summary
We are currently in the midst of a massive global extinction event [1], with the current wave of biodiversity reduction mainly occurring due to habitat loss and habitat modification [1,2]. Studies have shown that the synergistic effects of habitat loss and fragmentation lead to profound changes in patterns of tree species composition [3,4], richness [5,6,7], functional [8,9,10,11] and phylogenetic diversity [12,13,14,15], with landscape configuration and edge effects commonly identified as the key drivers of floristic decay in tropical rainforests. The amount of forest cover at the landscape-scale is currently considered an important driver of biological change, and a meaningful proxy for habitat loss [16]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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