View article

Understanding the multifaceted relationship between biodiversity and land‐use intensity is key to conservation policy. To begin to characterize this relationship in a tropical region, we investigated the bird fauna in an agricultural landscape in southern Costa Rica. Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data show that about 27% of the land remains forested in the 15 km radius study region encompassing our sites. The rest was cleared about 40 yr ago for relatively small‐scale coffee and cattle production, intermixed with other crops. Our goals were to: (1) compare the composition of the avifauna found in forest‐fragment and open habitats of the countryside; (2) assess the faunal change that has occurred since deforestation; and (3) provide a baseline for future comparisons.

We surveyed the avifauna of eight forest fragments (0.3–25 ha) and 13 open‐habitat sites (1.0 ha each) in the agricultural landscape. The pre …