ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Long-term monitoring reveals widespread and severe declines of understory birds in a protected Neotropical forest.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The effect of climate change on avian offspring production: A global meta-analysis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Pooled it
- Nest Monitoring of Tropical Bird Species Offers a Window Into the Mechanisms of Anthropogenic Change.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Surveying tropical faunal diversity via airborne DNA analyses.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Large reductions in tropical bird abundance attributable to heat extreme intensification.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- A molecular specimen bank for contemporary and future study captures landscape-scale biodiversity baselines before Klamath River dam removal.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Potential for bird-insect phenological mismatch in a tri-trophic system.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Climate change aggravates bird mortality in pristine tropical forests.Science advances · 2025Article
- Human-Caused High Direct Mortality in Birds: Unsustainable Trends and Ameliorative Actions.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Global monitoring for biodiversity: Uncertainty, risk, and power analyses to support trend change detection.Science advances · 2024Article
- Underlying and proximate drivers of biodiversity changes in Mesoamerican biosphere reserves.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Mercury in Neotropical birds: a synthesis and prospectus on 13 years of exposure data.Ecotoxicology (London, England) · 2023Review
- Diversified farms bolster forest-bird populations despite ongoing declines in tropical forests.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Effects of meteorological conditions on brood care in cooperatively breeding carrion crow and consequences on reproductive success.Frontiers in zoology · 2023Article
- A framework for the detection and attribution of biodiversity change.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Physiologically vulnerable or resilient? Tropical birds, global warming, and redistributions.Ecology and evolution · 2023Review
- Wet and dry extremes reduce arthropod biomass independently of leaf phenology in the wet tropics.Global change biology · 2023Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Long-term studies on the population dynamics of tropical resident birds are few, and it remains poorly understood how their populations have fared in recent decades. Here, we analyzed a 44-y population study of a Neotropical understory bird assemblage from a protected forest reserve in central Panama to determine if and how populations have changed from 1977 to 2020. Using the number of birds captured in mist nets as an index of local abundance, we estimated trends over time for a diverse suite of 57 resident species that comprised a broad range of ecological and behavioral traits. Estimated abundances of 40 (∼70%) species declined over the sampling period, whereas only 2 increased. Furthermore, declines were severe: 35 of the 40 declining species exhibited large proportional losses in estimated abundance, amounting to ≥50% of their initial estimated abundances. Declines were largely independent of ecology (i.e., body mass, foraging guild, or initial abundance) or phylogenetic affiliation. These widespread, severe declines are particularly alarming, given that they occurred in a relatively large (∼22,000-ha) forested area in the absence of local fragmentation or recent land-use change. Our findings provide robust evidence of tropical bird declines in intact forests and bolster a large body of literature from temperate regions suggesting that bird populations may be declining at a global scale. Identifying the ecological mechanisms underlying these declines should be an urgent conservation priority.
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