Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T22:52:49.004Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Structurally complex farms support high avian functional diversity in tropical montane Ethiopia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2013

Aaron D. Gove ,
Kristoffer Hylander ,
Sileshi Nemomissa ,
Anteneh Shimelis  and
Woldeyohannes Enkossa
Aaron D. Gove*
Affiliation:
Department of Botany, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden
Kristoffer Hylander
Affiliation:
Department of Botany, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden
Sileshi Nemomissa
Affiliation:
Plant Biology and Biodiversity Management Programme Unit, P.O. Box 3434, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Anteneh Shimelis
Affiliation:
Plant Biology and Biodiversity Management Programme Unit, P.O. Box 3434, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Woldeyohannes Enkossa
Affiliation:
Department of Biology, Mettu College of Teachers Education, PO Box 44, Oromia, Ethiopia
*
1Corresponding author. Current address: Department of Environment and Agriculture, Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

Of all feeding guilds, understorey insectivores are thought to be most sensitive to disturbance and forest conversion. We compared the composition of bird feeding guilds in tropical forest fragments with adjacent agro-ecosystems in a montane region of south-west Ethiopia. We used a series of point counts to survey birds in 19 agriculture and 19 forest sites and recorded tree species within each farm across an area of 40 × 35 km. Insectivores (~17 spp. per plot), frugivores (~3 spp. per plot) and omnivores (~5 spp. per plot) maintained species density across habitats, while granivores and nectarivores increased in the agricultural sites by factors of 7 and 3 respectively. Species accumulation curves of each guild were equal or steeper in agriculture, suggesting that agricultural and forest landscapes were equally heterogeneous for all bird guilds. Counter to most published studies, we found no decline in insectivore species richness with forest conversion. However, species composition differed between the two habitats, with certain forest specialists replaced by other species within each feeding guild. We suggest that the lack of difference in insectivorous species numbers between forest and agriculture in this region is due to the benign nature of the agricultural habitat, but also due to a regional species pool which contains many bird species which are adapted to open habitats.

Keywords

Africaagro-ecosystemavifaunafeeding guildsspecies poolremnant trees
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Tropical Ecology , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , March 2013 , pp. 87 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

LITERATURE CITED

ANDRÉN, H. 1994. Effects of habitat fragmentation on birds and mammals in landscapes with different proportions of suitable habitat: a review. Oikos 71:355–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ASH, J. & ATKINS, J. 2009. Birds of Ethiopia and Eritrea: an atlas of distribution. Christopher Helm, London. 463 pp.Google Scholar
CANADAY, C. 1996. Loss of insectivorous birds along a gradient of human impact in Amazonia. Biological Conservation 77:63–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CHAPMAN, C. A. & CHAPMAN, L. J. 1996. Mid-elevation forests: a history of disturbance and regeneration. Pp. 385–400 in McClanahan, T. R. & Young, T. P. (eds.). East African ecosystems and their conservation. Oxford University Press, New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CLARKE, K. R. 1993. Non-parametric multivariate analysis of changes in community structure. Australian Journal of Ecology 18:117–143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CLOUGH, Y., DWI PUTRA, D., PITOPANG, R. & TSCHARNTKE, T. 2009. Local and landscape factors determine functional bird diversity in Indonesian cacao agroforestry. Biological Conservation 142:1032–1041.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DA SILVA, J. M. C., UHL, C. & MURRAY, G. 1996. Plant succession, landscape management, and the ecology of frugivorous birds in abandoned Amazonian pastures. Conservation Biology 10:491–503.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DAILY, G. C., EHRLICH, P. R. & SÁNCHEZ-AZOFEIFA, A. 2001. Countryside biogeography: use of human-dominated habitats by the avifauna of southern Costa Rica. Ecological Applications 11:1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DANIELSEN, F. 1997. Stable environments and fragile communities: does history determine the resilience of avian rain-forest communities to habitat degradation? Biodiversity and Conservation 6:423–433.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DARBYSHIRE, I., LAMB, H. & UMER, M. 2003. Forest clearance and regrowth in northern Ethiopia during the last 3000 years. The Holocene 13:537–546.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DONALD, P. F., GREEN, R. E. & HEATH, M. F. 2001. Agricultural intensification and the collapse of Europe's farmland bird populations. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 268:25–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DUFRÊNE, M. & LEGENDRE, P. 1997. Species assemblages and indicator species: the need for a flexible asymmetrical approach. Ecological Monographs 67:345–366.Google Scholar
DUNN, R. R. 2004a. Managing the tropical landscape: a comparison of the effects of logging and forest conversion to agriculture on ants, birds, and Lepidoptera. Forest Ecology and Management 191:215–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DUNN, R. R. 2004b. Recovery of faunal communities during tropical forest regeneration. Conservation Biology 18:1–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DUNNING, J. B. 1992. CRC handbook of avian body masses. CRC Press, Boca Raton. 371 pp.Google Scholar
DYNESIUS, M., HYLANDER, K. & NILSSON, C. 2009. High resilience of bryophyte assemblages in streamside compared to upland forests. Ecology 90:1042–1054.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
FISCHER, J., LINDENMAYER, D., BLOMBERG, S., MONTAGUE-DRAKE, R., FELTON, A. & STEIN, J. 2007. Functional richness and relative resilience of bird communities in regions with different land use intensities. Ecosystems 10:964–974.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
FISCHER, J., STOTT, J. & LAW, B. S. 2010. The disproportionate value of scattered trees. Biological Conservation 143:1564–1567.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
FJELDSÅ, J. 1999. The impact of human forest disturbance on the endemic avifauna of the Udzungwa Mountains, Tanzania. Bird Conservation International 9:47–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
FLATHER, C. H. 1996. Fitting species-accumulation functions and assessing regional land use impacts on avian diversity. Journal of Biogeography 23:155–168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
FRIIS, I., RASMUSSEN, F. N. & VOLLESEN, K. 1982. Studies in the flora and vegetation of southwestern Ethiopia. Opera Botanica 63:1–70.Google Scholar
GASTON, K. J. & BLACKBURN, T. M. 1995. Birds, body size and the threat of extinction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London. B. Biological Sciences 347:205–212.Google Scholar
GOVE, A. D., MAJER, J. D. & RICO-GRAY, V. 2005. Methods of conservation outside of formal reserve systems: the case of ants in the seasonally dry tropics of Veracruz, Mexico. Biological Conservation 126:328–338.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
GOVE, A. D., HYLANDER, K., NEMOMISSA, S. & SHIMELIS, A. 2008. Ethiopian coffee cultivation – implications for bird conservation and environmental certification. Conservation Letters 1:208–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
GRAY, M. A., BALDAUF, S. L., MAYHEW, P. J. & HILL, J. K. 2007. The response of avian feeding guilds to tropical forest disturbance. Conservation Biology 21:133–141.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
GREENBERG, R., BICHIER, P., ANGON, A. C., MACVEAN, C., PEREZ, R. & CANO, E. 2000. The impact of avian insectivory on arthropods and leaf damage in some Guatemalan coffee plantations. Ecology 81:1750–1755.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HAMILTON, A., TAYLOR, D. & VOGEL, J. C. 1986. Early forest clearance and environmental degradation in south-west Uganda. Nature 320:164–167.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HARRISON, S. & CORNELL, H. 2008. Toward a better understanding of the regional causes of local community richness. Ecological Letters 11: 969–979.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HARVEY, C. A., MEDINA, A., SÁNCHEZ, D. M., VÍLCHEZ, S., HERNÁNDEZ, B., SAENZ, J. C., MAES, J. M., CASANOVES, F. & SINCLAIR, F. L. 2006. Patterns of animal diversity in different forms of tree cover in agricultural landscapes. Ecological Applications 16:1986–1999.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
HYLANDER, K. & NEMOMISSA, S. 2008. Home garden coffee as a repository of epiphyte biodiversity in Ethiopia. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6:524–528.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
KARR, J. R. 1976. Within- and between-habitat avian diversity in African and Neotropical lowland habitats. Ecological Monographs 46:457–481.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LUCK, G. W. & DAILY, G. C. 2003. Tropical countryside bird assemblages: richness, composition, and feeding differ by landscape context. Ecological Applications 13:235–247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MANNING, A. D., FISCHER, J. & LINDENMAYER, D. B. 2006. Scattered trees are keystone structures – implications for conservation. Biological Conservation 132:311–321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MARTIN, E. A., VIANO, M., RATSIMISETRA, L., LALOË, F. & CARRIÈRE, S. M. 2012. Maintenance of bird functional diversity in a traditional agroecosystem of Madagascar. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 149:1–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCANN, J. C. 1995. People of the plow. An agricultural history of Ethiopia, 1800–1990. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. 304 pp.Google Scholar
MILLER, A. 2002. Subset selection in regression. Chapman & Hall, London. 256 pp.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MOREAU, R. E. 1966. The bird faunas of Africa and its islands. Academic Press, London. 424 pp.Google Scholar
MULWA, R. K., BÖHNING-GAESE, K. & SCHLEUNING, M. 2012. High bird species diversity in structurally heterogeneous farmland in western Kenya. Biotropica, in press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
NICHOLS, J. D., BOULINIER, T., HINES, J. E., POLLOCK, K. H. & SAUER, J. R. 1998. Inference methods for spatial variation in species richness and community composition when not all species are detected. Conservation Biology 12:1390–1398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
OWIUNJI, I. & PLUMPTRE, A. J. 1998. Bird communities in logged and unlogged compartments in Budongo Forest, Uganda. Forest Ecology and Management 108:115–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
REDMAN, N., STEVENSON, T. & FANSHAWE, J. 2009. Birds of the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia and Socotra. Christopher Helm, London. 512 pp.Google Scholar
RICKLEFS, R. E. 1987. Community diversity: relative roles of local and regional processes. Science 235: 167–171.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
ŞEKERCIOGLU, C. H. 2002a. Forest fragmentation hits insectivorous birds hard. Directions in Science 1:62–64.Google Scholar
ŞEKERCIOGLU, C. H. 2002b. Effects of forestry practices on vegetation structure and bird community of Kibale National Park, Uganda. Biological Conservation 107:229–240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ŞEKERCIOḠLU, Ç. H., EHRLICH, P. R., DAILY, G. C., AYGEN, D., GOEHRING, D. & SANDÍ, R. F. 2002. Disappearance of insectivorous birds from tropical forest fragments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 99:263–267.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
ŞEKERCIOĞLU, Ç. H., DAILY, G. C. & EHRLICH, P. R. 2004. Ecosystem consequences of bird declines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 101:18042–18047.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
SINCLAIR, A. R. E., MDUMA, S. A. R. & ARCESE, P. 2002. Protected areas as biodiversity benchmarks for human impact: agriculture and the Serengeti avifauna. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 269 2401–2405.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
SIRIWARDENA, G. M., CRICK, H. Q. P., BAILLIC, S. R. & WILSON, J. D. 2000. Agricultural land-use and the spatial distribution of granivorous lowland farmland birds. Ecography 23:702–719.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
SODHI, N. S., LIOW, L. H. & BAZZAZ, F. A. 2004. Avian extinctions from tropical and subtropical forests. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 35:323–345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
STOUFFER, P. C. & BIERREGAARD, R. O. 1995. Use of Amazonian forest fragments by understory insectivorous birds. Ecology 76:2429–2445.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
TERBORGH, J. & WESKE, J. S. 1969. Colonization of secondary habitats by Peruvian birds. Ecology 50:765–782.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
TSCHARNTKE, T., SEKERCIOGLU, C. H., DIETSCH, T. V., SODHI, N. S., HOEHN, P. & TYLIANAKIS, J. M. 2008. Landscape constraints on functional diversity of birds and insects in tropical agroecosystems. Ecology 89:944–951.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
WALTERT, M., BOBO, K. S., SAINGE, N. M., FERMON, H. & MÜHLENBERG, M. 2005. From forest to farmland: habitat effects on afrotropical forest bird diversity. Ecological Applications 15:1351–1366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar