ecologists have assessed the status of all of the birds of prey found in the rainforest habitat. Nearly all the raptors were extremely rare outside the reserves, as expected. They also found that the larger the reserve was, the denser the birds populations were within the reserve. Interestingly, a scientist named Lovejoy (I couldn’t find his first name) in 1986 found a similar phenomena with Amazonian birds in the Biological Dynamics of forest project (BDFF) in Brazil. The primary goal of the project is to discover how rainforest communities respond after an intact ecosystem is split into different size fragments. They found a crowding effect, in which the abundance of birds in a forest fragment increased significantly directly after deforestation of the adjacent area. The increased number of birds was attributed to the migration of birds from the newly clear-cut area to the forest fragment. This crowding effect decreased with increasing size of a forest fragment. Both tropical and temperate communities, however, are prone to the same problems of inbreeding and loss of genetic variability, which results from isolating subpopulations of plants and animals from each other due to habitat fragmentation. If too large a distance exists between two fragments and a species are unable to disperse across the area in between, the population is essentially divided. Inbreeding may result if the subpopulation in a given fragment is small. This has not been directly documented, but it is possible. Size of a fragment and the amount of edge are inextricably linked. Abrupt edges often results form fragmenting and ecosystem, in contrast to the more gradual natural ecotones. Edge positively impacts many species of plants and animals, but as mentioned previously, the species which benefit typically are those which do not require human protection and management because they can easily meet their resource need outside of the intact ec...
