Each year Rainforest Expedition’s hosts undergraduate students from Stanford University, who are provided with all food and accommodation at the lodges where they are based. Traditionally, the research has been based out of the community lodge Posada Amazonas, where work concentrated on the impacts of the ecotourism enterprise on lifestyles and attitudes. Over the last two years, research has become more focused on the wildlife, and as such for the last two years the students have been hosted at Refugio Amazonas. One such student was Matthew Champoux, who conducted 3 months of field research into the avian community around the lodge for his Master’s Thesis, entitled “Avian diversity in the anthropogenic forests of Tambopata, Peru”. The following is the discussion of the work, methods and conclusions: Relative to other land use patterns in the tropical forest landscape, little is known about the impacts of small-scale selective logging and ecotourism on wildlife. Here I present a preliminary report on the impacts of these land use patterns on avian diversity obtained from a point-count distance sampling effort at three different sites of Terra Firme forest along the Tambopata River in the department of Madre de Dios, Peru. Two sites were located in the buffer zone bordering the Tambopata-Candamo Reserved Zone (TCRZ)—one each in selectively logged and ecotourist sites—and the third fell within the TCRZ as a control site. One species of particular conservation value present within the research plots was the Blue-headed Macaw (Primolius couloni). 170 species of bird were recorded in total. ANOVAs illustrated that across study sites, avian diversity varied significantly and its structure was directly related to the foliage density of middle and lower forest strata. The control transect had lower levels of rarity and a lower frequency of individuals than the other sites. A key finding is that species previously thought to be highly sensitive to anthropogenic impacts—the foliage-gleaning, insectivorous Formacariidae—are thriving on the impacted lands encapsulated by the ecotourist and logged sites. These data, in conjunction with the anthropogenic past of the Tambopata area suggest that avian diversity benefits from small-scale disturbance regimes associated with small-holder, forest gardening practices, ecotourism, and selective logging.
