| Endemic tapaculo birds (Rhinocryptidae) are biological indicators of habitat degradation in the temperate forest of southern South America, but little is known about the physiognomical features that determine the use of space in natural habitats. We studied the spatial structure and the microhabitat use at different spatial scales of species of tapaculos in a well-conserved forest of NW Patagonia (Argentina). We recorded the abundance of tapaculos and forest characteristics along a 1500 m transect divided in 75, 20 x 20 m contiguous plots. We evaluated the spatial patchiness in abundance of birds by Moran's I correlograms. We disentangled the spatial variability of bird abundance at three different, progressively finer (broad, intermediate, fine), spatial... |
