Welcome to the American Ornithological Society 2018 Annual Conference. We are pleased to have you join us at the lovely Hilton El Conquistador Resort in Tucson, AZ.
Connell's classic paper theorized an intermediate level of disturbance could maintain diversity. Forests in southern Belize are naturally disturbed, downing trees and flooding waterways. From November-May 2008-12, we conducted monthly surveys of the bird community using point counts along the Bladen River in the Monkey River Watershed. We tested for bird community differences along a possible disturbance gradient at four, 30-hectare plot locations representing high (H), intermediate (I), low (L), and undisturbed (U) rainforest in two continuous protected areas. We hypothesized that disturbed locations would support higher richness and diversity compared to undisturbed. We detected 28,565 individuals, 232 species, and 48 families. We compared bird communities using several metrics. First, we used species-accumulation curves with rarefaction to account for effort differences, yielding near flat-line asymptotes and indicating complete coverage. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMS) revealed a pattern supporting our hypothesis (75.5\% variance explained), and the pattern was significant (p$
