Richness and conservation status of birds in an Atlantic Forest fragment in the Pernambuco Endemism Center, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil

The Atlantic Forest is among the largest biodiversity hotspots in the world. Despite being one of the best studied tropical forests, some regions such as the Pernambuco Endemism Center, in the northeast of Brazil, still lack bird inventories. Between 2016-2017 we surveyed the birds of RPPN Mata Estrela, Baía Formosa, Rio Grande do Norte aiming to assess the conservation status of the community. We used standard point counts methods, non-systematic surveys and scientific publications to update the number of species known for the study area. Finally, we estimated the species richness for the study area using the non-parametric estimator Jackknife 1. From total, 40% of species were found only in our surveys, 25% in published data and the remaining 35% in both. The most of species (36%) occurred both in semideciduos forest and sandy coastal forest (restinga), followed by species found solely in the forest (30%), resting (22%), associated with water bodies (6%) and surrounding matrix (6%). We obtained a expected richness of more than 90 species when considering only point counts data (71 ssp) without stabilization of the cumulative curve, despite the high number of samples (400 samples). Our results suggest that the RPPN has considerable species richness, including endemics (11 ssp.) and threatened (11 ssp.) such as Conopophaga cearae, Penelope superciliaris, Momotus momota marcgraviana and Herpsilochmus pectoralis, justifying the importance of this area for bird conservation in the region.