1998/01/01 by Scott K. Robinson · 1 citation
Environmental Science · #Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management #Forest Management and Policy
paper · doi:10.2307/4089105
NEOTROPICAL MIGRATORY BIRDS and forest fragmentation will be forever linked in the literature.Scientists may debate about the extent to which migratory songbirds are declining, but few doubt that they are adversely affected by fragmentation.Severe negative demographic consequences of fragmentation have been documented at several spatial scales, including local (e.g.distance from edges), landscape (e.g.among tracts of different sizes and shapes), and regional (e.g.among landscapes that differ in forest cover).Yet, because of their huge global populations and high rates of natal and adult dispersal, Neotropical migrants keep recolonizing forest fragments in which their nesting success is extremely low.As a resuit, populations in fragmented forests can appear relatively stable even if their nesting success is far below levels necessary to compensate for adult mortality (i.e. they are population "sinks"; Brawn and Robinson 1996).For researchers, this provides an opportunity to study processes that would have caused local extinctions long ago in organisms that are less mobile than birds.For these reasons, Neotropical migrants have become flagship indicators of the negative consequences of frag2 mentation and of large-scale source / sink population dynamics.Studies of one Neotropical migrant, the Ovenbird (Seiurus aurocapillus), have provided E-mail: