It seems intuitive that degradation (e.g. logging) will cause greater changes to microclimates and microhabitats in humid forest than in dry forests, because there is naturally more light penetration in intact dry forests. Is there any empirical evidence that dry forest species are therefore less sensitive to degradation?
Rompré et al. 2007 is a good place to start to find an answer to this question: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2006.01657.x/abstract
Hi Charlie, this is not intractable, but it does need a fairly sophisticated analysis because at a global scale this is also a comparison between tropical and temperate forests, and one might expect tropical birds to be more sensitive because they tend to be more k-selected, breed at much lower densities, and have smaller global ranges than forest birds of temperate latitudes. Certainly it is documented though that a significant edge effect of partial deforestation of humid forest at any latitude is drying out of the remaining remnants, and that can impact many taxa across plants, fungi and animals.
Good answers from Nicole and Andrew. To those answers, I would also say that this issue is complicated by what your metric for sensitivity is. Not only may responses to forest degradation vary across temporal and spatial scales, they likely vary at differential hierarchical scales. That is, you may consider if a metric of physiological sensitivity (e.g. response to water deprivation, stress response, constraints of the visual system) is relevant to large-scale measures of sensitivity, such as population performance (rate of increase, etc.). Because your question focused on responses of birds to microclimatic variation, I'm guessing that you're most interested in how physiological sensitivity impacts population-level phenomena. This is no easy task, though there are several groups now explicitly addressing physiological tolerance in this context.
It will depend on the biogeographic and climatic envelope of the dry forests you are considering. If they are megatherm dry forests then they will tend to have a range of more generalist species than is generally found in humid forests (do you mean rainforests?). However, depending on their landscape position these dry megatherm may be habitat refuges in a grassland landscape. And degradation mean many things and the things to check are niche loss. So many qualifiers! and yes Rompre et al would appear a useful place to start.
Depends on the specific forest i think...Species native to a forest type, whether humid or dry, have adapted to the range (or subset) of climatic, biotic and abiotic conditions prevalent in that forest. Generalist and opportunistic vertebrate spp can handle change better than specialist spp. Hence, whether humid forest denizens are more sensitive to habitat degradation than dry forest spp, i think, would depend on the specific forest, and cannot be generalized, unless one looks at species diversity that is usually higher in humid forests. Indeed , dry tropical forests are amongst the most endangered terrestrial ecosystems, and have a unique set of vertebrates not found in other ecosystems. While humid forests can easily dry out upon clearance, clearance of dry forests thro logging and fire can also impact habitat for vertebrates substantially, like loss of dead trees, leaf litter layer, etc.
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