Woodpeckers, decay, and the future of cavity-nesting vertebrate communities worldwide

By K. Cockle, K. Martin, Tomasz A Wesolowski. 2011

310 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In forests worldwide, tree-cavity supply can limit populations of the 10–40% of bird and mammal species that require cavities for nesting or roosting. Conservation efforts aimed at cavity-using communities have often focused on woodpeckers because, as cavity excavators, they are presumed to control cavity supply. We show that avian excavators are the primary cavity producers in North America (77% of nesting cavities), but not elsewhere (26% in Eurasia and South America; 0% in Australasia). We studied survivorship of 2805 nest cavities and found similar persistence of cavities created by woodpeckers and those created by decay in Canada, but low persistence of woodpecker-excavated cavities in Poland and Argentina. Outside of North America, the ephemeral nature of many woodpecker cavities may render most cavity-using vertebrates critically dependent on the slow formation of cavities by damage and decay. The future of most cavity-using communities will therefore be highly dependent on changing forest policies to stem the current loss of old trees.

Subfields: Ecology, Insect Science, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0bfef5e8103b45051ac14adf3eb939fb7ae9977b

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Citations in the corpus

Tree microhabitats as indicators of bird and bat communities in Mediterranean forests (2013, background): “This result is consistent with previous observations regarding the role of tree cavities (Aitken and Martin, 2007; Cockle et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2004).”
Forest biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and the provision of ecosystem services (2017, background): “Many forest bird and mammal species depend on the presence of 317 tree cavities associated with deadwood for nesting and roosting (Cockle et al. 2011; Burgar et al. 2015).”
Biotic homogenization: Loss of avian functional richness and habitat specialists in disturbed Andean temperate forests (2015, result): “However, in a manner analogous to many other countries (Cockle et al., 2011), forest policies in Chile specify the lower diameter of trees to be cut down.”
Tree related microhabitats in temperate and Mediterranean European forests: A hierarchical typology for inventory standardization (2018, background): “Similarly, since woodpeckers do not occur in Australasia (Cockle et al., 2011), the TreM group woodpecker breeding cavities is not relevant for e.”