Long-term monitoring reveals widespread and severe declines of understory birds in a protected Neotropical forest

Significance We leveraged a 44-y population study of Neotropical understory birds from a protected forest reserve in central Panama to document widespread and severe declines in bird abundance. Our findings provide evidence that tropical bird populations may be undergoing systematic declines, even in relatively intact forests. The implications of these findings are that biodiversity baselines may be shifting over time, and large tracts of tropical forest may not be sufficient for maintaining stable bird populations. Our study highlights the importance of long-term monitoring for detecting cryptic losses in biodiversity and motivates the need for future work drilling down to the underlying mechanisms to understand and mitigate future declines.