Old-growth forest specialists are among the species most affected by commercial forestry. However, it is often unclear whether such species can persist and what their habitat needs are in managed forests. We investigated habitat selection of one such old-growth forest specialist, the white-backed woodpecker (Dendrocopos leucotos), a species highly dependent on dead wood and typically found in primeval forests. Our aim was to understand factors affecting occupancy probability in managed forests in Central Europe, based on detection/non-detection data in 62 squares of 1 km 2 in 2015 and 2016. We used occupancy models to compare a priori expectations about the relationships between occupancy and habitat characteristics at two spatial scales while accounting for imperfect detection. Occupancy was best explained by a proxy for food availability at a large (1 km 2) scale and increased with the abundance of emergence holes produced by saproxylic beetles on standing and lying dead wood. Furthermore, occupancy was positively related to the mean DBH (diameter at breast height) of live trees and standing dead wood at a small scale (0.25 km 2 with high amounts of dead wood). Detection probability was negatively related to time of day, date, and number of accessible survey points, and positively related to the number of observers. Our results demonstrate that detailed knowledge about a species' foraging ecology is important for its effective conservation as surrogate criteria such as dead wood availability might not reflect the key factors required. For white-backed woodpeckers, it is important that the available dead wood is sufficiently colonized by saproxylic beetles, and for the conservation of the species, the habitat requirements of saproxylic beetles thus have to be taken into account as well.
We use multilocus molecular data and species distribution modelling to investigate the phylogenetics and the phylogeography of the White‐backed Woodpecker (Dendrocopos leucotos), a bird species widely distributed over the entire Palaearctic. Our phylogenetic results reveal three well‐supported clades within D. leucotos: the Chinese endemic subspecies (tangi, insularis), the northerly distributed subspecies (leucotos, uralensis) and the four poorly genetically differentiated Japanese subspecies (subcirris, stejnegeri, namiyei, owstoni), and the south‐western Palaearctic lilfordi subspecies. According to our results, the Amami Woodpecker, endemic to Amami Oshima Island (Ryukyu archipelago, Japan) sometimes treated as full species Dendrocopos owstoni, does not deserve a species‐level status. Based on the mitochondrial phylogeographic results, the Japanese archipelago was recently colonized only once by D. leucotos from eastern Eurasia. Our results suggest a split between the leucotos and lilfordi lineages that dates back to mid‐Pleistocene (around 0.6 Mya) with likely no gene flow between these two subspecies since then. Our results thus do not support a phylogeographic pattern in which Central Europe and Northern Europe were recolonized from one or several southern glacial refugia where lilfordi populations persisted through several Pleistocene glacial periods. Spatial variation in mitochondrial diversity across leucotos/uralensis populations and niche ecological modelling suggest a possible eastward population expansion from a unique glacial refugium likely located in Central Europe. Molecular species delimitation methods, gene flow analyses and differences in adult and juvenile plumage indicate that the lilfordi subspecies may warrant to be ranked as a valid phylogenetic species. Further studies are nevertheless needed in the Balkans, where leucotos and lilfordi came recently into contact to measure the effectiveness of reproductive barriers and gene flow.
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