Riparian forest birds data

We performed our study in 24 riparian forests located in southern Minas Gerais state, southeastern Brazil (Table 1). The studied forest remnants lie in a transitional region between the Atlantic Forest and Cerrado, two of the most biologically rich and highly threatened biomes in Brazil. The original forest type in this region is described as semideciduous seasonal Atlantic Rainforest, but in much of the region this has been drastically reduced to small and sparse forest fragments. We selected the riparian forest sites by combining information from land cover and drainage network maps. Those selected sites ranged from 30 m to 1420 m in width considering both sides of the stream, from 0.88 to 496.18 ha in patch size from 3% to 67% in forest cover, presented a similar forest shape (we excluded complex forms or riparian corridors connected to other forest fragments), and were separated by at least 2 km from each other. We used point counts to sample birds. We selected three stream-side point count locations in each riparian forest, with each point separated by at least 200 m. Each sampling location was visited once between 2013 and 2017 and we defined as the sampling area a zone of 30 m radius around each point. Sampling observations occurred always in the three first hours after sunrise, and consisted in recording all individuals seen and/or heard inside the 30 m buffer during 10 minutes of observation at each point. We excluded Trochilidae (hummingbirds) from our samples because of the difficulty of identifying them using point counts. We calculated the relative abundance of each species by adding the number of all individuals observed (avoiding double counting of the same individuals) in the three point locations of each riparian forest. We used two matrices, containing the relative abundance of bird species sampled in each riparian forest (Table 2), and the key functional traits of those species (Table 3), to calculate three components of Functional Diversity – Functional Redundancy, Functional Evenness, Functional Richness.