Rights statement: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Hatfield, J. H., Barlow, J. , Joly, C. A., Lees, A. C., Parruco, C. H., Tobias, J. A., Orme, C. D. and Banks‐Leite, C. (2019), Mediation of area and edge effects in forest fragments by adjacent land use. Conservation Biology. doi:10.1111/cobi.13390 which has been published in final form at https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cobi.13390 This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.
Accepted author manuscript, 1.1 MB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
<mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 1/04/2020 |
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<mark>Journal</mark> | Conservation Biology |
Issue number | 2 |
Volume | 34 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Pages (from-to) | 395-404 |
Publication Status | Published |
Early online date | 4/09/19 |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
Habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation have pervasive detrimental effects on tropical forest biodiversity, but the role of the surrounding land use (i.e., matrix) in determining the severity of these impacts remains poorly understood. We surveyed bird species across an interior-edge-matrix gradient to assess the effects of matrix type on biodiversity at 49 different sites with varying levels of landscape fragmentation in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest—a highly threatened biodiversity hotspot. Both area and edge effects were more pronounced in forest patches bordering pasture matrix, whereas patches bordering Eucalyptus plantation maintained compositionally similar bird communities between the edge and the interior and exhibited reduced effects of patch size. These results suggest the type of matrix in which forest fragments are situated can explain a substantial amount of the widely reported variability in biodiversity responses to forest loss and fragmentation.