Low species turnover of upland Amazonian birds in the absence of physical barriers

Aim: One of the oldest and most powerful ways for ecologists to explain distinct biological communities is to invoke underlying environmental differences. But in hyper-diverse systems, which often display high species richness and low species abundance, these sorts of community comparisons are especially challenging. The classic view for Amazonian birds posits that riverine barriers and habitat specialization determine local and regional community composition. We test the tacit, complementary assumption that similar bird communities should therefore permeate uniform habitat between major rivers, regardless of distance.
Location: Upland (terra firme) rainforests of central Amazonia.
Results: In all, we detected 244 forest-dependent birds, with an average of 190 species (78%) per plot. Species turnover was negligible, no unique indicator species were found among plot pairs, and all documented species were already known from a complete inventory at one of the three sites.
Main conclusions:...

目标：生态学家解释独特生物群落最古老且最有力的方法之一是援引潜在的环境差异。但在通常表现出高物种丰富度和低物种多度的超多样系统中，这类群落比较尤其具有挑战性。关于亚马逊鸟类的经典观点认为，河流屏障与生境特化决定了局域和区域的群落组成。我们检验了一个隐含的补充假设：即相似的鸟类群落应能遍布主要河流之间的均一栖息地，无论距离远近。
地点：亚马逊中部的高地（terra firme）雨林。
结果：我们共检测到244种依赖森林的鸟类，每个样地平均有190种（占78%）。物种周转可忽略不计，样地对间未发现独特的指示物种，且所有记录物种均已在三个研究点之一的完整名录中被记录。
主要结论：...