Reversing large-scale habitat degradation and deforestation goes beyond what can be achieved by site-level ecological restoration and a landscape ecology perspective is fundamental. Here we assess the relative importance of tree cover and its configuration on forest-dependent birds and late-successional tree seedlings in restoration sites in southern Costa Rica. The abundance and species richness of birds increased in landscapes with more corridors, higher tree cover, and lower levels of fragmentation, highlighting the importance of riparian corridors for connectivity, and continuous tree cover as suitable habitat. Landscape variables affected abundance and species richness of seedlings similarly, but effects were weaker, possibly because seedlings face establishment limitation in addition to dispersal limitation. Moreover, the scale of landscape effects on seedlings was small, likely because proximal individual trees can significantly influence recruitment in restoration plots. Results underscore the importance of incorporating landscape-level metrics to restoration projects, as knowing the extent, and how the landscape may affect restoration outcomes can help to infer what kind of species will arrive to restoration plots.

Abstract: Understanding the effects of forest loss and fragmentation per se (independent of forest loss) on wildlife is urgently needed to design biodiversity-friendly landscape scenarios, particularly for forest-specialist species, such as many ground and arboreal tropical mammals. As this topic remains contentious, we assessed the species-specific response of 14 arboreal and ground mammals to landscape-scale forest loss and fragmentation measured across different scales in the Lacandon rainforest, Mexico. Surprisingly, most species (6 of 14 species, 43%) were weakly related to forest loss, or positively associated with it (7 of 14, 50%), likely because in this young agricultural frontier some individuals can crowd in the remaining forest patches. Only the Geoffroy’s spider monkey was negatively impacted by forest loss. We did not find evidence of extinction thresholds (nonlinear responses to forest loss) in any species. Only in four species fragmentation per se provided a slightly better fit to the data, but as expected, its effect was non-significant. Our multiscale analysis revealed that the scale of effect of forest loss and fragmentation was independent of body mass and habitat use (arboreal vs. ground). Taken together, our findings suggest that landscape composition is more important than configuration, and highlight the conservation value of the studied landscapes for arboreal and ground mammals. In fact, they add to growing evidence indicating that, on a per-area basis, a piece of forest land in a highly deforested landscape has a similar conservation value to that of a more forested one.