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. Our findings correspond with the conclusions of other studies that certified forests can maintain levels of fauna biodiversity similar to those of undisturbed primary forest in the Amazon region.

Expanding 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. Our aim was to create empirical baseline data to help guide development of future plantations into areas where biodiversity impacts are minimized. We used soundscapes to assess fauna in oil palm landscapes of Colombia, the world’s 4th largest palm oil producer.

Soundscape recordings provide a permanent record of a site at a given time and contain a wealth of invaluable and irreplaceable information. In this commentary, we (1) argue for the need to increase acoustic monitoring in tropical systems; (2) describe the types of research questions and conservation issues that can be addressed with passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) using both shortand long-term data in terrestrial and freshwater habitats; and (3) present an initial plan for establishing a global repository of tropical recordings.

To improve our understanding of how environmental gradients influence patterns of animal communities and to test the relationship between soundscapes and animal composition we investigated how variation in bird and anuran composition affect the acoustic structure and composition of the soundscapes along an elevation gradient. This study shows how different animal taxa respond to environmental gradients and provide strong evidence for the use of soundscapes as a tool to describe and compare species distribution and composition across large spatial scales.

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. We show a strong positive relationship between ASU and regional and acoustic morphospecies richness. Premontane forest sites had the highest ASU and the highest species richness, while dry forest and montane sites had lower ASU and lower species richness. Furthermore, we show that insect richness was the best predictor of variation in total ASU, and that insect richness was proportionally greater at high-diversity sites.

An upward shift in elevation is one of the most conspicuous species responses to climate change. Nevertheless, downward shifts and, apparently, the absences of response have also been recently reported. Given the growing evidence of multiple responses of species distributions due to climate change and the paucity of studies in the tropics, we evaluated the response of a montane bird community to climate change, without the confounding effects of land-use change.