A productivity-based explanation for woodland bird declines: poorer soils yield less food

Watson, David M.

doi:10.1071/mu09109

Cited by 96 publications

(127 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Long-term monitoring has identified significant collapses in woodland bird populations in southern and eastern Australia, including of recently common species Szabo et al 2011;Watson 2011). The capacity to improve the situation depends on understanding the interaction of the natural history of species with habitat features, subsequent demographic outcomes, and critical ecological processes within a system (Kavanagh et al 2007;Bowen et al 2009;Selwood et al 2009;Ford 2011).…”

Section: Avian Declines and The Need For Understanding Ecological Promentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards modelling persistence of woodland birds: the role of genetics

Sunnucks

2011

Emu - Austral Ornithology

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Abstract. Assessing how environmental change affects the probability of persistence of organisms requires an understanding of dispersal through, and occupation of, landscapes, and the associated demographic outcomes. Projections of differences in persistence probability can then be made under different scenarios of land-use and global environmental change. Rates and distances of dispersal, and demographic change and trajectories, are difficult to measure accurately, but genetic approaches can make major contributions. For two decades the field of molecular ecology has been providing useful life-history information relevant to population management, including key ecological attributes such as disease-resistance and thermal biology, mobility, dispersal and gene flow, habitat connectivity, the spatial and temporal scales of population processes, and demography. Genetic estimators of these factors could be employed to a much greater extent than they are currently. To facilitate this increased use, genetic estimates of functional connectivity (mobility and gene flow of organisms) and demography need to be integrated directly into decision-making processes. Population genetics is well suited to Bayesian approaches, with associated benefits including the ability to consider many factors, and estimation of error and parameter sensitivities. Genetic estimators based on the mobility and reproductive success of individual organisms and their key ecological traits can make unique contributions alongside other types of data into agent-based, spatially explicit modelling approaches of real landscape scenarios at the range of scales needed by managers. Virtually all the tools to do this exist. It is imperative that genetic samples be collected for contemporary and future analyses.

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Section: Avian Declines and The Need For Understanding Ecological Promentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards modelling persistence of woodland birds: the role of genetics

Sunnucks

2011

Emu - Austral Ornithology

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“…Surprisingly, richness tended to be higher in higher Manorina reporting rate landscapes beyond low levels of cover (Figure 3.3e). This may reflect the fact that Manorina honeyeaters often favour more productive areas , which may support more individuals and therefore more species through greater energy and resource availability (Storch et al, 2005;Watson, 2011). Furthermore, noisy and yellow-throated miners tend to have their strongest adverse effects on smaller birds, although they are also associated with increases in larger birds (Howes et al, 2014;Kutt et al, 2015).…”

Section: Ecological Mechanisms Moderate the Effect Of Vegetation Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The significance of non-random clearing for studies of biodiversity in human-modified landscapes is captured by Watson's (2011, p. 16) The flat, fertile landscapes such as floodplains, evoked by Watson (2011) as the bestquality woodland bird habitat, are also the most attractive areas for agriculture. Because these landscapes are preferentially cleared of native vegetation, while vegetation is retained in landscapes that are less suitable for human land use, the amount of habitat (as represented by native vegetation cover) among multiple landscape mosaics is potentially confounded by abiotic factors which also affect the occurrence of species (Lindenmayer & Luck, 2005;.…”

Section: Abiotic Landscape Attributes and Non-random Clearingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, species richness may vary in response to both vegetation area and other landscape attributes, such as soil fertility which affects resource availability (Watson, 2011), or topographic variation which is often correlated with habitat heterogeneity and niche availability . These same landscape attributes may also underpin differences in patterns of vegetation clearing and anthropogenic land use (Seabrook et al, 2006;Cattarino et al, 2014), and in consequence, may act indirectly on species via their association with the configuration and condition of remnant vegetation (and the matrix) (Figure 3.1).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Frequently, land is cleared of its native vegetation based on its potential to support land uses such as agriculture (Lunt & Spooner, 2005;Laurance, 2008;Watson, 2011), so the spatial pattern of vegetation clearing reflects heterogeneity in the biophysical and socioeconomic factors that promote such land use (Rompré et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Implications of vegetation clearing biases for the interpretation of landscape-scale species-area relationships

Simmonds¹

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Vegetation clearing results in the loss of species from landscapes. Indeed, the area of remaining native vegetation is an important determinant of species richness in humanmodified mosaics. Of interest to ecologists and landscape managers is the effect of areathat is, how the number of species a landscape supports changes with the amount of native vegetation, as revealed by the shape and functional form of the species-area relationship. Understanding this is vital for guiding conservation interventions such as setting limits to vegetation clearing or establishing revegetation targets.Crucially though, it is not only vegetation area that affects patterns of species richness at the landscape level-so do environmental attributes such as soil properties and topography. Complicating the matter is the fact that these attributes tend to be correlated ii Second, I explored the extent to which the effect of native vegetation area on species richness differed in 100 km 2 landscapes categorised by attributes such as soil fertility, range in elevation or matrix land use. Using a case study of south-east Australian birds, Ifound that the shape of the species-area relationship varied substantially depending on whether landscapes were, for example, more-or less-topographically variable, or had higher or lower soil fertility. While threshold models depicting a point of sudden change in the effect of area emerged consistently, the amount of vegetation corresponding with observed thresholds differed considerably among landscape types. Therefore, aggregating and analysing species-area data from different landscape types is likely to misrepresent how species richness is affected by vegetation area. This will be exacerbated by clearing biases, because heavily cleared landscapes tend to be characterised by very different attributes to high cover landscapes. When data for the entire study extent were analysed, a remarkable degree of scaleinvariance was observed-namely, a threshold relationship with a change-point at approximately 30% vegetation cover. However, when data were analysed for two regional subsets of the overall dataset, the effect of vegetation area, and the factors moderating this relationship, were scale-dependent. Given this finding, observed thresholds can only reliably be used to guide landscape management at the scale and in the region where the relationship was observed.Finally, I evaluated the implications of accounting for clearing biases when using speciesarea relationships to guide conservation, focussing on a region of Australia undergoing rapid landscape transformation. I found that using observed thresholds from species-area models that do and do not account for landscape attributes yielded different outcomes for landscape-scale species richness conservation, given a scenario of future vegetation loss.Specifically, the number and location of landscapes that could be prioritised for conservation actions varied considerably depending on the species-area model used.This research demonstrates that the eff...

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Rainfall can explain adaptive phenotypic variation with high gene flow in the New Holland Honeyeater (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae)

Myers

Donnellan

Kleindorfer

2012

Ecology and Evolution

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Identifying environmentally driven changes in traits that serve an ecological function is essential for predicting evolutionary outcomes of climate change. We examined population genetic structure, sex-specific dispersal patterns, and morphology in relation to rainfall patterns across an island and three peninsulas in South Australia. The study system was the New Holland Honeyeater (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae), a nectarivorous passerine that is a key pollinator species. We predicted that rainfall-related mechanisms would be driving local adaptation of morphological traits, such that in areas of lower rainfall, where nectar is less available, more insectivorous traits – shorter, deeper bills, longer tarsi, and longer wings – would be favored. The study populations differed in phenotype across the Eyre, Yorke, and Fleurieu Peninsulas and Kangaroo Island despite high gene flow (single continuous population) and sex-biased dispersal (males were philopatric and females dispersed). We tested the role of rainfall in shaping the observed phenotypic differences, and found strong support for our predicted relationships: birds in areas of higher rainfall had higher condition indices, as well as longer bill-head length, deeper bills, and shorter tarsi. Bill depth in males in high-rainfall sites showed signals of stabilizing selection, suggesting local adaptation. In addition to these local indications of selection, a global pattern of directional selection toward larger size for bill-head length, bill-nostril length, and wing length was also observed. We suggest this pattern may reflect an adaptive response to the relatively dry conditions that South Australia has experienced over the last decade. We conclude that rainfall has shaped aspects of phenology in P. novaehollandiae, both locally, with different patterns of stabilizing and directional selection, and globally, with evidence of adaptive divergence at a landscape scale.

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A productivity-based explanation for woodland bird declines: poorer soils yield less food

Cited by 96 publications

References 56 publications

Towards modelling persistence of woodland birds: the role of genetics

Towards modelling persistence of woodland birds: the role of genetics

Implications of vegetation clearing biases for the interpretation of landscape-scale species-area relationships

Rainfall can explain adaptive phenotypic variation with high gene flow in the New Holland Honeyeater (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae)

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