Affiliation:
1. Department of Biosciences Rice University Houston Texas USA
2. Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Rice University Houston Texas USA
3. Department of Biology University of Florence Florence Italy
4. MUSE—Museo delle Scienze Trento Italy
5. Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre Mang'ula Tanzania
6. Department of Biology University of Texas at Arlington Arlington Texas USA
Abstract
AbstractMany 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.
Funder
American Philosophical Society
Conservation International
National Science Foundation
Northrop Grumman
Sigma Xia
Subject
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Cited by
2 articles.
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