The effects of small-scale disturbance on forest birds: a meta-analysis

Small-scale disturbance is a significant process in all major forest biomes. Some silvicultural practices, particularly group selection harvesting, intend to emulate natural small-scale disturbance by harvesting small clearcuts in the continuous forest. We conducted a meta-analysis on the effects of small-scale harvesting on North American breeding forest birds. We extracted species richness and relative abundance of several functional bird groups and guilds from published studies and compared them between gap-dominated and unlogged forest as a function of forest type and the size and age of the gap. The abundance of many bird groups was higher in the gap-dominated than in the continuous f…