Shrews (Soricidae) of the lowland forests around Kisangani (DR Congo)

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Abstract

The Congo Basin rainforest is the second largest rainforest in the world and one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth. Nevertheless, the Congo Basin biodiversity remains to be fully mapped, with many species awaiting discovery or official description. In recent years, much effort has been put into research on shrews (Soricidae), particularly in the region around Kisangani (D.R. Congo). Shrews are opportunistic feeders that are able to forage on a large diversity of invertebrate prey and therefore play an important role in the forest ecosystem. Furthermore, as they largely depend on forest habitats and have limited dispersal capacities, shrews form an interesting model group to study biogeographic patterns in the Congo Basin.

This paper collates the efforts on shrew research from the wider region around Kisangani, in the centre of the Congo Basin. Apart from sampling information, the dataset includes morphological measures, DNA sequences and photographs. This dataset is therefore critical in the study of the taxonomy and ecology of Soricidae in the Congo Basin lowland rainforests.

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Human-driven land-use changes increasingly threaten biodiversity, particularly in tropical forests where both species diversity and human pressures on natural environments are high. The rapid conversion of tropical forests for agriculture, timber production and other uses has generated vast, human-dominated landscapes with potentially dire consequences for tropical biodiversity. Today, few truly undisturbed tropical forests exist, whereas those degraded by repeated logging and fires, as well as secondary and plantation forests, are rapidly expanding. Here we provide a global assessment of the impact of disturbance and land conversion on biodiversity in tropical forests using a meta-analysis of 138 studies. We analysed 2,220 pairwise comparisons of biodiversity values in primary forests (with little or no human disturbance) and disturbed forests. We found that biodiversity values were substantially lower in degraded forests, but that this varied considerably by geographic region, taxonomic group, ecological metric and disturbance type. Even after partly accounting for confounding colonization and succession effects due to the composition of surrounding habitats, isolation and time since disturbance, we find that most forms of forest degradation have an overwhelmingly detrimental effect on tropical biodiversity. Our results clearly indicate that when it comes to maintaining tropical biodiversity, there is no substitute for primary forests.

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