Amazonian countryside habitats provide limited avian conservation value

Abstract

Balancing ever-increasing agricultural and biofuel needs with biodiversity conservation is one of the greatest challenges facing conservation biologists in the 21st century. The conversion of >75 million hectares of forests in Brazilian Amazonia over four decades for agropastoral uses has resulted in the ‘creation’ of a similar-sized amount of non-forest ‘agricultural matrix’ habitats. Despite extensive research on the effects of forest loss and fragmentation on the Amazonian biota, the value of increasingly larger areas of non-forest habitat for forest wildlife remains poorly understood. We conducted 325 fixed-radius point counts of the avifaunal assemblage of non-forest vegetation within a 1200-km2 region along the Amazonian ‘Arc of Deforestation’ in Northern Mato Grosso, Brazil. Our sampling included 2,814 records of 164 species, 15 and 54% of which were recorded in more than 10% and fewer than 2% of all sampling sites, respectively. In particular, nearly 70% of the regional scale avifauna of 560 species failed to use the agricultural matrix, regardless of the persistence of ameliorating structural features, such as isolated trees. At the local scale, higher species richness in the agricultural matrix was best predicted by the presence of relictual trees, and to a lesser extent by standing water and scrubby habitats. The presence of relictual trees, rather than scrub, predicted the occurrence of those forest-dependent species that did use the agricultural matrix. Our results indicate that intensive agricultural production coupled with land sparing would better suit conservation of vulnerable forest species than more extensive ‘wildlife friendly’ agricultural practices that require more land under production to produce the same yield

Reframing the land‐sparing/land‐sharing debate for biodiversity conservation

“…Studies that did not collect some of these key data cannot necessarily be interpreted as supporting sparing or sharing. For example, studies that did not collect yield data do not evaluate the biodiversity‐productivity trade‐off . Studies that evaluated biodiversity metrics only in farmland but not in the forest fragments that made up the “wildlife‐friendly” component of agriculture may bias conclusions toward land sparing .…”

“…Thus, the sharing–sparing dichotomy may force conservation biologists into a choice between two undesirable alternatives. Instead of an either‐or framework, a “both‐and” framework could lead toward a scenario that most if not all conservationists could get behind—large protected areas surrounded by a relatively wildlife‐friendly matrix promoting connectivity through a combination of favorable land uses and corridors . How to get there is a question worth asking, and getting there is a goal worth striving for.…”

Taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity of an urban Amazonian avifauna

“…Non-native species only seem to manage to gain a toe-hold in Amazonia in urban systems; our own exhaustive inventories of rural agricultural regions failed to find evidence of colonisation of exotic species (e.g. Mahood et al 2012;Moura et al 2013).…”

What conservationists need to know about farming

“…land sharing) is beneficial for biodiversity conservation [38,54 -57] (but see [58]). While it is important to consider the conservation value of farmland, the observation that some species persist in it does not mean that it should be conserved at all costs.…”