Based on their long-term bird capture data, students and colleagues of RNR wildlife professor Dr. Phil Stouffer documented declining abundance and morphological changes in resident Amazonian rainforest birds in the absence of landscape change.

Dr. Jared Wolfe, who earned his Ph.D. in 2014 from RNR and is now on the faculty at Michigan Technological University, led a new analysis of the data, which stretches back to 1980. The analysis revealed a mechanism that links climate change to changes in these bird species. The team found that harsh dry seasons reduced survival for 24 of 29 species with enough data to analyze.

For the white-plumed antbird, one of the most common species, apparent survival dropped from more than 60% in the mildest dry seasons to less than 25% in the harshest years. Unfortunately, the current climate trajectory will mean fewer good years and more bad years. These troubling results likely extend throughout neotropical rainforests. Bird declines have also been reported in Panama and Ecuador.

Their work was published in Science and is available at Climate change aggravates bird mortality in pristine tropical forests | Science Advances.

A white-plumed antbird.