Data from: Long-term change in the avifauna of undisturbed Amazonian rainforest: Ground-foraging birds disappear and the baseline shifts

How are rainforest birds faring in the Anthropocene? We use bird captures
spanning >35 years from 55 sites within a vast area of intact
Amazonian rainforest to reveal reduced abundance of terrestrial and
near-ground insectivores in the absence of deforestation, edge effects, or
other direct anthropogenic landscape change. Because undisturbed
forest includes far fewer terrestrial and near-ground insectivores than it
did historically, today’s fragments and second growth are more
impoverished than shown by comparisons with modern ‘control’ sites. Any
goals for bird community recovery in Amazonian second growth should
recognize that a modern bird community will inevitably differ from a
baseline from >35 years ago. Abundance patterns driven by landscape
change may be the most conspicuous manifestation of human activity, but
biodiversity declines in undisturbed forest represent hidden losses,
possibly driven by climate change, that may be pervasive in intact
Amazonian forests and other systems considered to be
undisturbed.