Land management strategies can increase oil palm plantation use by some terrestrial mammals in Colombia.

While the conservation role of remaining natural habitats in anthropogenic landscapes is clear, the degree to which agricultural matrices impose limitations to animal use is not well understood, but vital to assess species' resilience to land use change. Using an occupancy framework, we evaluated how oil palm plantations affect the occurrence and habitat use of terrestrial mammals in the Colombian Llanos. Further, we evaluated the effect of undergrowth vegetation and proximity to forest on habitat use within plantations. Most species exhibited restricted distributions across the study area, especially in oil palm plantations. Habitat type strongly influenced habitat use of four of the 12 more widely distributed species with oil palm negatively affecting species such as capybara and naked-tailed armadillo. The remaining species showed no apparent effect of habitat type, but oil palm and forest use probabilities varied among species. Overall, generalist mesocarnivores, white-tailed deer, and giant anteater were more likely to use oil palm while the remaining species, including ocelot and lesser anteater, showed preferences for forest. Distance to nearest forest had mixed effects on species habitat use, while understory vegetation facilitated the presence of species using oil palm. Our findings suggest that allowing undergrowth vegetation inside plantations and maintaining nearby riparian corridors would increase the likelihood of terrestrial mammals' occurrence within oil palm landscapes.

Terrestrial mammal responses to oil palm dominated landscapes in Colombia.

The rapid expansion of oil palm cultivation in the Neotropics has generated great debate around possible biodiversity impacts. Colombia, for example, is the largest producer of oil palm in the Americas, but the effects of oil palm cultivation on native fauna are poorly understood. Here, we compared how richness, abundance and composition of terrestrial mammal species differ between oil palm plantations and riparian forest in the Colombian Llanos region. Further, we determined the relationships and influence of landscape and habitat level variables on those metrics. We found that species richness and composition differed significantly between riparian forest and oil palm, with site level richness inside oil palm plantations 47% lower, on average, than in riparian forest. Within plantations, mammalian species richness was strongly negatively correlated with cattle abundance, and positively correlated with the density of undergrowth vegetation. Forest structure characteristics appeared to have weak and similar effects on determining mammal species richness and composition along riparian forest strips. Composition at the landscape level was significantly influenced by cover type, percentage of remaining forest and the distance to the nearest town, whereas within oil palm sites, understory vegetation, cattle relative abundance, and canopy cover had significant effects on community composition. Species specific abundance responses varied between land cover types, with oil palm having positive effects on mesopredators, insectivores and grazers. Our findings suggest that increasing habitat complexity, avoiding cattle and retaining native riparian forest-regardless of its structure-inside oil palm-dominated landscapes would help support higher native mammal richness and abundance at both local and landscape scales.

Warning signals of biodiversity collapse across gradients of tropical forest loss.

We evaluate potential warning signals that may aid in identifying the proximity of ecological communities to biodiversity thresholds from habitat loss-often termed "tipping points"-in tropical forests. We used datasets from studies of Neotropical mammal, frog, bird, and insect communities. Our findings provide only limited evidence that an increase in the variance (heteroskedasticity) of biodiversity-related parameters can provide a general warning signal of impending threshold changes in communities, as forest loss increases. However, such an apparent effect was evident for amphibians in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest and Amazonian mammal and bird communities, suggesting that impending changes in some species assemblages might be predictable. We consider the potential of such warning signs to help forecast drastic changes in biodiversity.