Agrarian change in tropical landscapes

Agricultural expansion has transformed forest habitats at alarming rates across the globe, but especially so in tropical landscapes (Laurance et al. 2014; Shackelford et al. 2014) due to increasing global demands for food, fiber and biofuels (Tilman and Clark, 2014). This has resulted in mosaic landscapes encompassing varying levels of tree cover, human settlement and agricultural production units. The expansion of agriculture has resulted in large-scale habitat loss, fragmentation of forests and simplification of natural ecosystems, causing increases in the probability of extinction in small and isolated populations of both flora and fauna (Tilman et al. 1994), significant losses in biological diversity (Fahrig 2003; Ewers and Didham 2006; Krauss et al. 2010) and negative impacts on many ecosystem services (Hooper et al. 2005; Tscharntke et al. 2008).