Bird diversity and endemism along a land-use gradient in Madagascar: the conservation value of vanilla agroforests

Land-use change is the most important driver of biodiversity loss worldwide and particularly so in the tropics, where natural habitats are transformed into large-scale monocultures or heterogeneous landscape mosaics of largely unknown conservation value. Using birds as an indicator taxon, we evaluated the conservation value of a landscape mosaic in north-eastern Madagascar, a biodiversity hotspot and the center of global vanilla production. We assessed bird species richness and composition by conducting point counts across seven prevalent land-use types (forest- and fallow-derived vanilla agroforests, woody and herbaceous fallow that are part of a shifting cultivation system, rice paddy, forest fragment and contiguous old-growth forest). We find that old-growth forest had the highest species richness, driven by a high share of endemics. Species richness and community composition in forest-derived vanilla agroforest was similar to forest fragment, whereas fallow-derived vanilla agrof...