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Publication Details
AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS
SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH
agricultural and biological sciences
Tropical forest mammal occupancy and functional diversity increase with microhabitat surface area
Ecology, Volume 104, No. 12, Article e4181, Year 2023
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Description
Many animal–environment interactions are mediated by the physical forms of the environment, especially in tropical forests, where habitats are structurally complex and highly diverse. Higher structural complexity, measured as habitat surface area, may provide increased resource availability for animals, leading to higher animal diversity. Greater habitat surface area supports increased animal diversity in other systems, such as coral reefs and forest canopies, but it is uncertain how this relationship translates to communities of highly mobile, terrestrial mammal species inhabiting forest floors. We tested the relative importance of forest floor habitat structure, encompassing vegetation and topographic structure, in determining species occupancy and functional diversity of medium to large mammals using data from a tropical forest in the Udzungwa Mountains of Tanzania. We related species occupancies and diversity obtained from a multispecies occupancy model with ground-level habitat structure measurements obtained from a novel head-mounted active remote sensing device, the Microsoft HoloLens. We found that habitat surface area was a significant predictor of mean species occupancy and had a significant positive relationship with functional dispersion. The positive relationships indicate that surface area of tropical forest floors may play an important role in promoting mammal occupancy and functional diversity at the microhabitat scale. In particular, habitat surface area had higher mean effects on occupancy for carnivorous and social species. These results support a habitat surface area–diversity relationship on tropical forest floors for mammals. © 2023 The Authors. Ecology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Ecological Society of America.
Authors & Co-Authors
Gorczynski, Daniel
United States, Houston
Rice University
Rovero, Francesco
Italy, Florence
Università Degli Studi Di Firenze
Mtui, Arafat S.
Tanzania, Mang'ula
Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre Uemc
Shinyambala, Steven
Tanzania, Mang'ula
Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre Uemc
Hsieh, Chia
United States, Houston
Rice University
Frishkoff, Luke Owen
United States, Arlington
The University of Texas at Arlington
Beaudrot, Lydia H.
United States, Houston
Rice University
Statistics
Citations: 1
Authors: 7
Affiliations: 4
Identifiers
Doi:
10.1002/ecy.4181
ISSN:
00129658
Study Locations
Tanzania