Rainforest Connection | Publications

Passive Acoustic Monitoring as a Tool to Investigate the Spatial Distribution of Invasive Alien Species

September 13, 2022

Invasive alien species (IAS) are a threat to biodiversity and ecosystem function worldwide. Unfortunately, researchers, agencies, and other management groups face the unresolved challenge of effectively detecting and monitoring IAS at large spatial and temporal scales. To improve the detection of soniferous IAS, we introduced a pipeline for large-scale passive acoustic monitoring (PAM). Our main goal was to illustrate how PAM can be used to rapidly provide baseline information on soniferous IAS.

An Acoustic Journey to a Tropical Island

July 28, 2022

The world faces a major biodiversity crisis. It is estimated that over the last 500 years, hundreds of animal species have gone extinct. Furthermore, many remaining species have experienced dramatic population declines due to the impacts of human activities, such as hunting, vehicle collisions, habitat loss, the introduction of exotic species, and global warming. To prevent this decline from continuing, it is essential to increase our knowledge and understanding of the natural history, ecology, and distribution of species of great conservation need and the habitats in which they occur.

Understanding the occupancy patterns of Amazon floodplain birds

July 7, 2022

In the Amazon basin, several species are restricted to or occur primarily in habitats along rivers. However, little is known about habitat occupancy over time and how seasonal fluctuations in the level of rivers affect bird species occurrence in floodplains. In this study, we verified if the occupancy and detection probability of 10 floodplain bird specialist species are related to 3 environmental variables considered to be important for floodplain birds: the number of Tessaria shrubs, the number of Cecropia trees, and the number of other tree species. We also tested if occupancy and detection probabilities changed among flood pulse seasons.

How are frogs responding to hurricanes, droughts, and climate change?

December 30, 2021

Acoustic monitoring can help us understand how the frog community in Puerto Rico responds to different types of disturbances.
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Impacts of a large hydroelectric dam on the Madeira River (Brazil) on floodplain avifauna

December 30, 2021

Hydroelectric dams represent an important threat to seasonally flooded environments in the Amazon basin. We aimed to evaluate how a dam in the Madeira River, one of the largest tributaries of the Amazonas River, affected floodplain avifauna. Bird occurrence was recorded through simultaneous passive acoustic monitoring in early successional vegetation and floodplain forest downstream from the dam and upstream in sites impacted by permanent flooding after dam reservoir filling.

The Role of Urbanness, Vegetation Structure, and Scale in Shaping Puerto Rico’s Acoustically Active Mangrove Fauna Communities

December 29, 2021

The mangroves of Puerto Rico occupy a gradient of urbanization that offers a chance to test hypotheses on urban faunal communities. These hypotheses state that urban avifaunal communities have greater representation by generalists and that certain mangrove specialists can utilize urban landscapes. Much of this is said to be driven by food resources, with frugivores and nectarivores benefiting from abundant residential flowers and fruits, while insectivores are driven away by low food resources.

Climate change is creating a mismatch between protected areas and suitable habitats for frogs and birds in Puerto Rico

August 2, 2021

Climate change is altering the spatial distribution of many species around the world. In response, we need to identify and protect suitable areas for a large proportion of the fauna so that they persist through time. This exercise must also evaluate the ability of existing protected areas to provide safe havens for species in the context of climate change.

Bird Occupancy of a Neotropical Forest is Stable but influenced by Forest age

January 28, 2021

The effects of forest degradation, fragmentation, and climate change occur over long time periods, yet relatively few data are available to evaluate the long-term effects of these disturbances on tropical species occurrence. Here, we quantified changes in occupancy of 50 bird species over 17 years on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama, a model system for the long-term effects of habitat fragmentation.

Impacts of Drought and Hurricane on tropical bird and frog distributions

January 1, 2021

During the last few decades, much attention has focused on how global change is affecting the environment and species distributions. Land-use change is still the major cause of species declines worldwide, but changes in species distributions have been documented even in pristine and protected areas. Here, we document the distribution dynamics of 26 species of frogs and birds within a Caribbean protected area between 2015 and 2019.

Acoustic metrics predict habitat type and vegetation structure in the Amazon

June 27, 2020

The rapidly developing field of ecoacoustics offers methods that can advance multi-taxa animal surveys at policy-relevant extents. While the field is promising, there remain foundational assumptions that need to be tested across different biomes before the methods can be applied widely. Here we test two of these assumptions in the Amazon: 1) acoustic indices can be used to predict soundscapes of different habitat types, and 2) acoustic indices are related to vegetation structure.