Authors: Cordeiro Pereira, João; Mikusiński, Grzegorz;Storch, Ilse;

Recent decades have seen a move towards novel forest management practices integrating biodiversity conservation with other forest uses. Their effects on bird diversity and abundance are relatively well studied, but less is known about demographic processes underlying those responses. To shed light in this issue and to highlight research gaps in the field, we gathered existing evidence on how breeding success of forest birds responds to different experimental manipulations of forest structure. A comprehensive literature search, following a standard systematic review protocol, was carried out on Web of Science, returning 62 studies which fulfilled our criteria. Studied interventions are very heterogenous and geographically biased towards North America. Selective logging, partial logging and prescribed burning are the most thoroughly researched interventions. Breeding success outcomes vary highly across both bird functional groups and intervention types. Interventions often resulted in improved breeding success only for a limited set of species, and their benefit may be hampered by factors acting at the landscape scale (e.g. high nest parasitism). If productivity of a wide set of forest bird species is to be improved beyond standard management practices, a mosaic of management strategies needs to be implemented and landscape-scale limiting factors must be addressed.