By The Conversation
It’s tempting to think that our forests would be fine if we could simply stop trees being felled or burnt. But forests – particularly tropical ones – are more than just trees. They’re also the animals that skulk and swoop among them.
Worryingly, these furry and feathered companions are rapidly disappearing – and our new research indicates that this will have grave repercussions for the role forests play in combating climate breakdown.
Healthy tropical forests swarm with life. Beyond myriad invertebrates, there are seed-eating rodents, a range of leaf eaters, birds of all kinds, and often primates. However, many forests have already lost most of their largest animals, mainly as a result of hunting to supply a growing bushmeat trade.
Hunting isn’t the only reason. Thanks to deforestation for farmland and logging, many forests today are highly fragmented. The small, unconnected patches that remain aren’t big enough to support populations of the largest species, which tend to need more space.
The disappearance of animals from otherwise intact habitats is known as defaunation, and it is leading to a growing number of empty forests not just in tropical countries, but around the world. The UK has already lost most of its largest species (think lynx, wolf, and wisent), while woodland bird numbers have declined by a quarter since 1970.
The impacts of this defaunation have attracted the attention of the world’s conservation scientists, but studies to date have usually been carried out at single locations. Consequently, we lack a worldwide picture that takes into account different types of forest and the diversity of animals that are disappearing.
