Does small-scale land use affect the understory birds negative in the Peruvian National Reserve Allpahuayo Mishana?

Abstract: Human activities that lead to fragmentation and habitat loss are big problems in the world. Due to global climate change the negative effects of fragmented habitats can be catastrophic for many organisms. In the Amazon rainforest, that is most sensitive to human impact, stands a big risk to lose its species diversity. Fragmentation and climate change together seems to escalate the death rate of rainforest plants and that will change the whole ecosystem. Birds and insects are depending on the trees and the trees faces big challenges now. Many of the rainforest organisms have been noticed to emigrate further up to northern altitudes due to the warmer climate and maybe also because of deforestation. Many of the lowland forest birds are predicted to distribute from their origin habitats. The national reserve Allpahuayo Mishana in the Peruvian Amazon is known for its diversity of birds. It is a big challenge for the reserve to maintain the origin forest composition from climate change, which will lead to losses of species. The reserve allows the local community to utilize the land for small-scale uses inside the protected zone. Many of the birds are sensitive for external disturbance. Most human activities are resulting in that the forest becomes less dense, which can lead to that the territory for the birds decreases. This makes it important for the reserve to improve the human land use not to restrict the birds' habitat inside the reserve. This project will investigate if the small-scale land uses affects the understory birds’ diversity and habitat negative. The purpose is to see if the fragmented forests in the reserve, closest to the utilized land, can functioning as a secondary forest for the understory birds, or are the understory birds limited by the small-scale land use, in the national reserve Allpahuayo Mishana? Four sites with various human activities were chosen to investigate if the sites contain any understory birds. The result showed that the most disturbed sites had poor bird diversity compare to the sites with no human disturbance.