Inter-annual dynamics and persistence of small mammal communities in a selectively logged tropical forest in Borneo
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Understanding temporal change and long-term persistence of species and communities is vital if we are to accurately assess the relative values of human-modified habitats for biodiversity. Despite a large literature and emerging consensus demonstrating a high conservation value of selectively logged tropical rainforests, few studies have taken a long-term perspective. We resampled small mammals (≤1kg) in a heavily logged landscape in Sabah, Borneo between 2011 and 2016 to investigate temporal patterns of species-level changes in population density. We found that small mammal population density in heavily logged forest was highly variable among years, consistent with patterns previously observed in unlogged forest, and uncovered evidence suggesting that one species is potentially declining towards local extinction. Across nine species, population densities varied almost sevenfold during our six-year study period, highlighting the extremely dynamic nature of small mammal communities in this ecosystem. Strictly terrestrial murid species tended to exhibit strong temporal dynamics, whereas semi-arboreal foraging species such as treeshrews had more stable dynamics. We found no relationships between population density and fruit/seed mass, and therefore no evidence that our patterns represent responses to inter-annual mast fruiting of the dominant canopy dipterocarp trees. This may be due to the removal of most of the canopy during logging, and hence the dipterocarp seed resource, although it possibly also reflects spatiotemporal limitations of our data. Our results underline the importance of understanding long-term variability in animal communities before developing conservation and management recommendations for human-altered ecosystems.
Date Issued
2018-10-01
Date Acceptance
2018-07-20
Citation
Biodiversity and Conservation, 2018, 27 (12), pp.3155-3169
ISSN
1572-9710
Publisher
Springer Verlag
Start Page
3155
End Page
3169
Journal / Book Title
Biodiversity and Conservation
Volume
27
Issue
12
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Sponsor
Rainforest Research Sdn Bhd
Grant Number
LBEE_P34395
Subjects
Science & Technology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Biodiversity Conservation
Ecology
Environmental Sciences
Biodiversity & Conservation
Environmental Sciences & Ecology
Tropical forest
Population dynamics
Logging
Temporal change
Small mammals
MAST-FRUITING DIPTEROCARPACEAE
RAIN-FOREST
LAND-USE
SECONDARY SUCCESSION
FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITY
POPULATION-DYNAMICS
SEED PREDATION
CONSERVATION
BIODIVERSITY
FRAGMENTATION
0501 Ecological Applications
0502 Environmental Science And Management
0602 Ecology
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2018-08-02