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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.
Click here to download articleDuring 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.
Click here to download articleThe 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.
Click here to download articleAutomated acoustic recorders can collect long-term soundscape data containing species-specific signals in remote environments. Ecologists have increasingly used them for studying diverse fauna around the globe. Deep learning methods have gained recent attention for automating the process of species identification in soundscape recordings.
Click here to download articleIn this study, we evaluated deep convolutional neural networks for classifying the calls of 24 birds and amphibian species detected in ambient field recordings from the tropical mountains of Puerto Rico. Training data were collected using a template-based detection algorithm followed by a manual validation process.
Despite several efforts to quantify the effectiveness of forest certification in developing sustainable use of forest resources, there is little evidence that certified forests are more effective in conserving fauna than non-certified managed forest.
Click here to download articleExpanding oil palm plantations have caused widespread deforestation and biodiversity loss in Southeast Asia, stigmatizing the industry around the world regardless of regional context. In Latin America, oil palm plantations are primarily replacing other agroindustrial land uses with uncertain implications for local biodiversity.
Click here to download articleKnowledge that can be gained from acoustic data collection in tropical ecosystems is low-hanging fruit. There is every reason to record and with every day, there are fewer excuses not to do it. In recent years, the cost of acoustic recorders has decreased substantially (some can be purchased for under US$50, e.g., Hill et al. 2018) and the technology needed to store and analyze acoustic data is continuously improving (e.g., Corrada Bravo et al. 2017, Xie et al. 2017).
Click here to download articleElevational gradients influence the distribution and composition
of animal species and can provide useful information for the development of conservation strategies in the context of climate change. Despite an increase in studies of species diversity along elevational gradients, there is still a lack of information about community responses to environmental gradients, in part because of the logistical limitations of sampling multiple taxa simultaneously.
Acoustic ecology, or ecoacoustics, is a growing field that uses sound as a tool to evaluate animal communities. In this manuscript, we evaluate recordings from eight tropical forest sites that vary in species richness, from a relatively low diversity Caribbean forest to a megadiverse Amazonian
forest, with the goal of understanding the relationship between acoustic space use (ASU) and species diversity across different taxonomic groups.