[ARTICLE] Are larger forest fragments better for birds?

Dr. David Luther, a professor at George Mason University in Virginia, recently joined the Amazon Biodiversity Center's BDFFP as a senior scientist. The journal Global Ecology and Conservation published in their September 2020 issue a journal article by BDFFP scientists, including Dr. Luther as lead author, entitled "Tropical forest fragmentation and isolation: Is community decay a random process?" The scientists reviewed more than 40 years of data on bird populations in forest fragments at the BDFFP's research reserve. Their conclusion is that "the species in the 10ha fragments were a nested subset of the species in the 100ha fragments", rather than a random set of species. This directional pattern of species loss from isolated fragments reinforces the BDFFP's tentative hypothesis that larger fragments are better at preserving biological diversity (among birds, at least) than small fragments.

You can read the article here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989420307095.