Adam S. Hadley

Social information trumps vegetation structure in breeding-site selection by a migrant songbird.

To maximize fitness, organisms must assess and select suitable habitat. Early research studying birds suggested that organisms consider primarily vegetation structural cues in their habitat choices. We show that experimental exposure to singing in the post-breeding period provides a social cue that is used for habitat selection the following year by a migrant songbird, the black-throated blue warbler (Dendroica caerulescens). Our experimental social cues coerced individuals to adopt territories in areas of very poor habitat quality where individuals typically do not occur. This indicates that social information can override typical associations with vegetation structure. We demonstrate that a strong settlement response was elicited because post-breeding song at a site is highly correlated with reproductive success. These results constitute a previously undocumented, but highly parsimonious mechanism for the inadvertent transfer of reproductive (public) information from successful breeders to dispersers. We hypothesize that post-breeding song is a pervasive and reliable cue for species that communicate vocally, inhabit temporally autocorrelated environments, produce young asynchronously and/or abandon territories after reproductive failure.

Acoustic classification of multiple simultaneous bird species: A multi-instance multi-label approach

Although field-collected recordings typically contain multiple simultaneously vocalizing birds of different species, acoustic species classification in this setting has received little study so far. This work formulates the problem of classifying the set of species present in an audio recording using the multi-instance multi-label (MIML) framework for machine learning, and proposes a MIML bag generator for audio, i.e., an algorithm which transforms an input audio signal into a bag-of-instances representation suitable for use with MIML classifiers. The proposed representation uses a 2D time-frequency segmentation of the audio signal, which can separate bird sounds that overlap in time. Experiments using audio data containing 13 species collected with unattended omnidirectional microphones in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve high accuracy (96.1% true positives/negatives). Automated detection of bird species occurrence using MIML has many potential applications, particularly in long-term monitoring of remote sites, species distribution modeling, and conservation planning.

The effects of landscape fragmentation on pollination dynamics: absence of evidence not evidence of absence

Animal‐mediated pollination is essential for both ecosystem services and conservation of global biodiversity, but a growing body of work reveals that it is negatively affected by anthropogenic disturbance. Landscape‐scale disturbance results in two often inter‐related processes: (1) habitat loss, (2) disruptions of habitat configuration (i.e. fragmentation). Understanding the relative effects of such processes is critical in designing effective management strategies to limit pollination and pollinator decline. We reviewed existing published work from 1989 to 2009 and found that only six of 303 studies considering the influence of landscape context on pollination separated the effects of habitat loss from fragmentation. We provide a synthesis of the current landscape, behavioural, and pollination ecology literature in order to present preliminary multiple working hypotheses explaining how these two landscape processes might independently influence pollination dynamics. Landscape disturbance primarily influences three components of pollination interactions: pollinator density, movement, and plant demography. We argue that effects of habitat loss on each of these components are likely to differ substantially from the effects of fragmentation, which is likely to be more complex and may influence each pollination component in contrasting ways. The interdependency between plants and animals inherent to pollination systems also has the possibility to drive cumulative effects of fragmentation, initiating negative feedback loops between animals and the plants they pollinate. Alternatively, due to their asymmetrical structure, pollination networks may be relatively robust to fragmentation. Despite the potential importance of independent effects of habitat fragmentation, its effects on pollination remain largely untested. We postulate that variation across studies in the effects of ‘fragmentation’ owes much to artifacts of the sampling regimes adopted, particularly (1) incorrectly separating fragmentation from habitat loss, and (2) mis‐matches in spatial scale between landscapes studied and the ecological processes of interest. The field of landscape pollination ecology could be greatly advanced through the consideration and quantification of the matrix, landscape functional connectivity, and pollinator movement behaviour in response to these elements. Studies designed to disentangle the independent effects of habitat loss and fragmentation are essential for gaining insight into landscape‐mediated pollination declines, implementing effective conservation measures, and optimizing ecosystem services in complex landscapes.

Tropical deforestation alters hummingbird movement patterns

Reduced pollination success, as a function of habitat loss and fragmentation, appears to be a global phenomenon. Disruption of pollinator movement is one hypothesis put forward to explain this pattern in pollen limitation. However, the small size of pollinators makes them very difficult to track; thus, knowledge of their movements is largely speculative. Using tiny radio transmitters (0.25 g), we translocated a generalist tropical ‘trap-lining’ hummingbird, the green hermit (Phaethornis guy), across agricultural and forested landscapes to test the hypothesis that movement is influenced by patterns of deforestation. Although, we found no difference in homing times between landscape types, return paths were on average 459±144 m (±s.e.) more direct in forested than agricultural landscapes. In addition, movement paths in agricultural landscapes contained 36±4 per cent more forest than the most direct route. Our findings suggest that this species can circumvent agricultural matrix to move among forest patches. Nevertheless, it is clear that movement of even a highly mobile species is strongly influenced by landscape disturbance. Maintaining landscape connectivity with forest corridors may be important for enhancing movement, and thus in facilitating pollen transfer.

The 9th annual MLSP competition: New methods for acoustic classification of multiple simultaneous bird species in a noisy environment

Birds have been widely used as biological indicators for ecological research. They respond quickly to environmental changes and can be used to infer about other organisms (e.g., insects they feed on). Traditional methods for collecting data about birds involves costly human effort. A promising alternative is acoustic monitoring. There are many advantages to recording audio of birds compared to human surveys, including increased temporal and spatial resolution and extent, applicability in remote sites, reduced observer bias, and potentially lower cost. However, it is an open problem for signal processing and machine learning to reliably identify bird sounds in real-world audio data collected in an acoustic monitoring scenario. Some of the major challenges include multiple simultaneously vocalizing birds, other sources of non-bird sound (e.g., buzzing insects), and background noise like wind, rain, and motor vehicles.

Creation of forest edges has a global impact on forest vertebrates

Forest edges influence more than half of the world’s forests and contribute to worldwide declines in biodiversity and ecosystem functions. However, predicting these declines is challenging in heterogeneous fragmented landscapes. Here we assembled a global dataset on species responses to fragmentation and developed a statistical approach for quantifying edge impacts in heterogeneous landscapes to quantify edge-determined changes in abundance of 1,673 vertebrate species. We show that the abundances of 85% of species are affected, either positively or negatively, by forest edges. Species that live in the centre of the forest (forest core), that were more likely to be listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), reached peak abundances only at sites farther than 200–400 m from sharp high-contrast forest edges. Smaller-bodied amphibians, larger reptiles and medium-sized non-volant mammals experienced a larger reduction in suitable habitat than other forest-core species. Our results highlight the pervasive ability of forest edges to restructure ecological communities on a global scale.

Spatial models reveal the microclimatic buffering capacity of old-growth forests

Spatial models of under-canopy temperature show that old-growth forests are cooler in spring months than mature forest plantations. Climate change is predicted to cause widespread declines in biodiversity, but these predictions are derived from coarse-resolution climate models applied at global scales. Such models lack the capacity to incorporate microclimate variability, which is critical to biodiversity microrefugia. In forested montane regions, microclimate is thought to be influenced by combined effects of elevation, microtopography, and vegetation, but their relative effects at fine spatial scales are poorly known. We used boosted regression trees to model the spatial distribution of fine-scale, under-canopy air temperatures in mountainous terrain. Spatial models predicted observed independent test data well (r = 0.87). As expected, elevation strongly predicted temperatures, but vegetation and microtopography also exerted critical effects. Old-growth vegetation characteristics, measured using LiDAR (light detection and ranging), appeared to have an insulating effect; maximum spring monthly temperatures decreased by 2.5°C across the observed gradient in old-growth structure. These cooling effects across a gradient in forest structure are of similar magnitude to 50-year forecasts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and therefore have the potential to mitigate climate warming at local scales. Management strategies to conserve old-growth characteristics and to curb current rates of primary forest loss could maintain microrefugia, enhancing biodiversity persistence in mountainous systems under climate warming.

Pollinator recognition by a keystone tropical plant

Significance By using structural characteristics, such as long tubular flowers, plants are known to achieve selective visitation by certain pollinator species. These morphological traits typically arise over evolutionary timescales. We show for the first time, to our knowledge, that at least one plant has also evolved the capacity to recognize pollinator species immediately after visitation, thereby increasing the likelihood that a flower visitor has delivered high-quality pollen. This novel responsiveness by the plant leads to functional specialization in an apparently generalized tropical plant–pollinator network. Such specialized linkages likely facilitate coevolution but also, render pollination mutualisms more vulnerable to environmental change. Understanding the mechanisms enabling coevolution in complex mutualistic networks remains a central challenge in evolutionary biology. We show for the first time, to our knowledge, that a tropical plant species has the capacity to discriminate among floral visitors, investing in reproduction differentially across the pollinator community. After we standardized pollen quality in 223 aviary experiments, successful pollination of Heliconia tortuosa (measured as pollen tube abundance) occurred frequently when plants were visited by long-distance traplining hummingbird species with specialized bills (x¯ pollen tubes = 1.21 ± 0.12 SE) but was reduced 5.7 times when visited by straight-billed territorial birds (x¯ pollen tubes = 0.20 ± 0.074 SE) or insects. Our subsequent experiments revealed that plants use the nectar extraction capacity of tropical hummingbirds, a positive function of bill length, as a cue to turn on reproductively. Furthermore, we show that hummingbirds with long bills and high nectar extraction efficiency engaged in daily movements at broad spatial scales (∼1 km), but that territorial species moved only short distances (<100 m). Such pollinator recognition may therefore affect mate selection and maximize receipt of high-quality pollen from multiple parents. Although a diffuse pollinator network is implied, because all six species of hummingbirds carry pollen of H. tortuosa, only two species with specialized bills contribute meaningfully to its reproduction. We hypothesize that this pollinator filtering behavior constitutes a crucial mechanism facilitating coevolution in multispecies plant–pollinator networks. However, pollinator recognition also greatly reduces the number of realized pollinators, thereby rendering mutualistic networks more vulnerable to environmental change.

Corridors restore animal-mediated pollination in fragmented tropical forest landscapes.

Tropical biodiversity and associated ecosystem functions have become heavily eroded through habitat loss. Animal-mediated pollination is required in more than 94% of higher tropical plant species and 75% of the worlds leading food crops, but it remains unclear if corridors avert deforestation-driven pollination breakdown in fragmented tropical landscapes. Here, we used manipulative resource experiments and field observations to show that corridors functionally connect neotropical forest fragments for forest-associated hummingbirds and increase pollen transfer. Further, corridors boosted forest-associated pollinator availability in fragments by 14.3 times compared with unconnected equivalents, increasing overall pollination success. Plants in patches without corridors showed pollination rates equal to bagged control flowers, indicating pollination failure in isolated fragments. This indicates, for the first time, that corridors benefit tropical forest ecosystems beyond boosting local species richness, by functionally connecting mutualistic network partners. We conclude that small-scale adjustments to landscape configuration safeguard native pollinators and associated pollination services in tropical forest landscapes.

Tropical forest fragmentation limits pollination of a keystone understory herb

Loss of native vegetation cover is thought to be a major driver of declines in pollination success worldwide. However, it is not well known whether reducing the fragmentation of remaining vegetation can ameliorate these negative effects. We tested the independent effects of composition vs. configuration on the reproductive success of a keystone tropical forest herb (Heliconia tortuosa). To do this we designed a large-scale mensurative experiment that independently varied connected forest-patch size (configuration) and surrounding amount of forest (composition). In each patch, we tested whether pollen tubes, fruit, and seed set were associated with these landscape variables. We also captured hummingbirds as an indication of pollinator availability in a subset of patches according to the same design. We found evidence for an effect of configuration on seed set of H. tortuosa, but not on other aspects of plant reproduction; proportion of seeds produced increased 40% across the gradient in patch size we observed (0.64 to > 1300 ha), independent of the amount of forest in the surrounding landscape at both local and landscape scales. We also found that the availability of pollinators was dependent upon forest configuration; hummingbird capture rates increased three and one-half times across the patch size gradient, independent of forest amount. Finally, pollinator availability was strongly positively correlated with seed set. We hypothesize that the effects of configuration on plant fitness that we observed are due to reduced pollen quality resulting from altered hummingbird availability and/or movement behavior. Our results suggest that prioritizing larger patches of tropical forest may be particularly important for conservation of this species.