Effects of Connectivity on the Forest Bird Communities of Adjacent Fragmented Landscapes

Summary. We assessed bird sensitivity to forest fragmentation in two adjacent landscapes in the Atlantic Forest of southern Brazil. One landscape is naturally fragmented and has high connectivity, whereas the other is human-fragmented and has low connectivity. We tested whether the sensitivity of bird species to fragmentation depends more on the intrinsic characteristics of the birds than on landscape connectivity. Point counts were used to sample small and large forest remnants in each landscape. The abundance of each species in these remnants was used as a proxy for sensitivity. To test whether the two landscapes differ in connectivity, we compared the following landscape metrics: landscape shape index (LSI), proximity index (PROX) and connectance index (CONNECT). We analysed the sensitivity of 85 species, 51 of which occurred exclusively in one of the two landscapes. In the landscape with low connectivity we recorded a large number of sensitive species. Among the 34 species that occurred in both landsc...