Sustaining biodiversity in tropical agricultural landscapes
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Anthropogenic lands now dominate much of the globe. While protected areas are critical in the fight against the 6th mass extinction, the conservation of many species will depend on the ability of these novel human landscapes to support life. This dissertation is an examination of the potential for tropical agricultural landscapes to preserve the many dimensions of biodiversity that exist outside of protected areas. I begin by using DNA metabarcoding to infer how the diversity and composition of trophic interactions between birds and their arthropod prey respond to variable land management practices in southern Costa Rica. I show that habitat heterogeneity, rather than the total amount of habitat available, may promote these feeding interactions, providing evidence that increasing landscape complexity is one potential mechanism to increase the diversity of resources available to birds. For the remainder of my dissertation, I take a temporal view to the structuring of tropical wildlife in forest and agricultural landscapes. To do this, I first quantify the role of climatic seasonality in structuring tropical biodiversity dynamics. I show that agricultural intensification degrades the rhythmic seasonal structuring of bird communities. In contrast, I show that diversified farming landscapes serve as an important seasonal habitat for both resident and migratory species. I next quantify population trends for several hundred bird species, and the influence of farming practices and climate change on the regulation of these dynamics. In particular, I provide the first empirical evidence that agricultural intensification and climate change act synergistically to drive population declines in tropical wildlife. Finally, I quantify the degree to which bird communities have changed over the past two decades in Costa Rican forests and agricultural landscapes. I find that communities in intensive agricultural habitats have changed substantially, with marked declines in species of conservation concern. I next show that, in part, these changes are driven by interactions between altered colonization-extinction dynamics, periodic climatic forcing, and species' climatic niches. Taken together, this dissertation demonstrates the potential for integrating biodiversity conservation with food production in tropical landscapes
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Hendershot, John Nicholas |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Fukami, Tadashi, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Fukami, Tadashi, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Daily, Gretchen C |
| Thesis advisor | Dirzo, Rodolfo |
| Thesis advisor | Mordecai, Erin |
| Degree committee member | Daily, Gretchen C |
| Degree committee member | Dirzo, Rodolfo |
| Degree committee member | Mordecai, Erin |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Biology. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | J. Nicholas Hendershot |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Biology |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by John Nicholas Hendershot
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...