Coffee plantations, hurricanes and avian resiliency: Insights from occupancy, and local colonization and extinction rates in Puerto Rico

Insights on impacts and resiliency of avian species with respect to hurricanes in the Caribbean have largely focused on responses measured in protected habitats. We assessed avian responses in non-protected habitat, specifically shade-restored coffee plantations, because their structural complexity retains many attributes of secondary forests, and may contribute to landscape scale species resiliency. We tallied species richness, and estimated occupancy probability of 12 resident avian species, after adjusting for imperfect detection, to assess the impact of hurricane Maria (20 September 2017) in the context of two stages of shade-restored coffee plantations. For 5 of those species, we also estimated local colonization and extinction probabilities to assess their prospect of rebounding (resiliency). We used survey data collected March-June 2015-2017 (pre-hurricane) and 2018 (post-hurricane) in 58 coffee farms and satellite imagery to assess vegetation structure. Restored farms were grouped into two categories based on time-since-restoration: newly-restored and fully-restored. We predicted that mean percent forest cover in fully-restored farms (~30-40%) would revert to levels in newly-restored farms (