Drivers affecting mammal community structure and functional diversity under varied conservation efforts in a tropical rainforest in Cameroon. (20th July 2019) - Laméris, D. W.
Abstract: As well as leading to a loss of biodiversity (i.e. species richness and abundance), human activities also affect ecosystem functioning. Documenting how the suite of ecological roles changes following disturbance provides a complementary source of information for conservation management. To this end, we measured mammal diversity in terms of community structure (i.e. abundance, composition and species richness) and functional diversity in three sites differing in conservation effort in a tropical rainforest in Cameroon. Results show that sites without primary or secondary conservation efforts had lower mammal abundances and an altered mammal composition but similar species richness compared to better‐protected areas. In terms of functional diversity, we found more variation of traits (i.e. FDis) in the site with primary conservation and higher abundances of functionally unique species (i.e. FOri) in sites with either primary or secondary conservation efforts. We found no overall difference in the abundance of specialist and generalist species between sites (i.e. FSpe). We identified several drivers affecting abundance, species richness and functional diversity of mammal communities, although there did not appear to be a common driver affecting all mammal diversity measures in a similar way. Our results suggest that, in addition to preserving mammal abundance and community composition, conservation efforts (both primary and secondary) are able to contribute to maintaining higher levels of functional diversity compared to areas devoid of conservation. We demonstrate that functional diversity metrics can provide valuable additional information about the status of mammal communities that can be used to better inform conservation management. Abstract : This study describes how mammal community structure (i.e. abundance, richness and composition) and functional diversity (FDis, FOri and FSpe) co‐vary over sites with different conservation efforts in the tropical rainforest in Cameroon. We found that primary and secondary conservation efforts have a positive effect on some, but not all, measures of mammal community structure and functional diversity and that a lack of conservation effort is associated with an impoverished mammal community structure and loss of functional diversity. We highlight that measures of mammal community structure and functional diversity do not capture the same changes in mammal communities and should be used to complement each other to ensure effective conservation management.