CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Birds play key roles in forest dynamics, favoring the resilience of forests to cattleranching. Generalist species may benefit from changes in the vegetation structurecaused by cattle grazing while specialist species are usually negatively affected.Therefore, studying changes in taxonomic and functional bird diversity can providevaluable information in order to propose the sustainable cattle management practices.Here, we study the influence of different cattle management practices (CattleExclusion: FCE; Continuous grazing: FCG; Rotational grazing: FRG; Seasonal grazing:FSG) on the understory vegetation structure, and the bird taxonomic and functionaldiversity in humid Chaco forests of Argentina. Forests under grazing had an open(FCG) or semi-open (FRG and FSG) understory, whereas FCE presented a closed understorywith higher plant richness. Generalized linear models revealed a decreasein bird richness and abundance under most cattle management practices comparedto FCE. However, FRG was most similar to FCE in terms of vegetation structure andshowed no differences in bird richness. FCE presented the lowest values of functionaldiversity while FCG and FRG showed the highest values. A fourth-corneranalysis showed that FCE was associated with insectivorous species which forage and nest inthe shrub layer, reflecting a possible loss of ecosystem services in forests with cattlegrazing. We propose FRG as the most appropriate cattle management option andthe least detrimental to bird assemblages. However, maintaining protected areas thatexclude cattle ranching activities will be key to strike a balance between the conservationof most specialist species and beef production.

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