A pantropical analysis of the impacts of forest degradation and conversion on local temperature

Temperature is a core component of a species’ fundamental niche. At the fine scale over which most organisms experience climate (mm to ha), temperature depends upon the amount of radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, which is principally governed by vegetation. Tropical regions have undergone widespread and extreme changes to vegetation, particularly through the degradation and conversion of rainforests. Since most terrestrial biodiversity is in the tropics, and many of these species possess narrow thermal limits, it is important to identify local thermal impacts of rainforest degradation and conversion. We collected pan-tropical, site-level (< 1 ha) temperature data from the literature to quantify impacts of land-use change on local temperatures, and to examine whether this relationship differed above-ground relative to below-ground and between wet and dry seasons. We found that local temperature in our sample sites was higher than primary forest in all human-impacted land-use typ...