The movement of frugivores between remnant forests and successional areas is vital for tropical forest tree species to colonize successional habitats. The response of these species to the spatial structure of pasture tree cover is largely unknown. We studied avian frugivores that were found in primary forest edges and large pastures in eastern Amazonia, Brazil. We determined how the small-scale...

Tropical forests around the world have been lost, mainly because of agricultural activities. Linear elements like riparian vegetation in fragmented tropical landscapes help maintain the native flora and fauna. Information about the role of riparian corridors as a reservoir of bat species, however, is scanty. We assessed the value of riparian corridors on the conservation of phyllostomid bat ass...

The future of biodiversity and ecosystem services depends largely on the capacity of human-dominated ecosystems to support them, yet this capacity remains largely unknown. Using the framework of countryside biogeography, and working in the Las Cruces system of Coto Brus, Costa Rica, we assessed reptile and amphibian assemblages within four habitats that typify much of the Neotropics: sun coffee...

Vegetation, seed rain, seed germination, microclimate, and soil physical and chemical parameters were measured in a recently abandoned pasture and adjacent primary rain forest in southern Costa Rica. The goal of this study was to assess the importance of these factors in limiting forest regeneration in abandoned pastures. Seed rain of animal dispersed species decreased dramatically in the pastu...

As people penetrate the Amazon interior, they build roads and clear large expanses of land. Over time, this process of deforestation creates forest fragments, islands of trees surrounded by a sea of pastures, farmland, and other degraded habitats. Laurance and his colleagues at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute are studying what happens to the forests when trees lose ground to agricul...

This work intends to examine if there are associations between fish species and the state of conservation of the riparian forest in the Corumbataí River Basin. Four main rivers were chosen for this study with three sites on each. Collections were carried out from March to June and from September to December 2001. Multivariate techniques were applied to determine the correlation between species ...

Expansion of oil palm plantations across the humid tropics has precipitated massive loss of tropical forest habitats and their associated speciose biotas. Oil palm plantation monocultures have been identified as an emerging threat to Amazonian biodiversity, but there are no quantitative studies exploring the impact of these plantations on the biome's biota. Understanding these impacts is extrem...

Cloud forests harbor high levels of orchid diversity. However, due to the high fragmentation of these forests in the Andes, combined with the pressure for new agricultural land, orchid diversity is highly threatened. Despite this worrying scenario, few studies have assessed the effects of habitat loss specifically on orchid assemblages in the Andes. The aim of this study was to analyze the edge...

Enrichment planting in naturally recovering secondary forests or in tree plantations is increasingly being used as strategy to restore later-successional, large-seeded tropical forest trees. We seeded two tree species (Otoba novogranatensis and Ruagea glabra) in three agricultural sites in Southern Costa Rica: abandoned pastures, eight to ten year old secondary forests and three year old tree p...