Roads, fire and aggressive competitors: Determinants of bird distribution in subtropical production forests

Maron, Martine; Kennedy, Simon J.

doi:10.1016/j.foreco.2006.11.017

Cited by 45 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 31 publications

(45 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…1; Appendix 3), and the extent of long-unburnt habitat varied from 0 ha to 88 ha per study landscape. Long unburnt habitat is defined here as 'preferred' habitat for woodland birds; Howes and Maron (2009);and Howes et al (2010) showed greater richness of woodland birds at survey sites in long-unburnt habitat in the same study area, and other work within the same bioregion has supported this finding (Maron and Kennedy 2007).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 63%

Drivers of diversity at the local- and landscape-scale in a fire-prone landscape

Burgess¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Determining the factors that generate and maintain patterns of biodiversity is a challenge central to ecology. To effectively manage heterogeneous landscapes for biodiversity conservation there is a need to understand the mechanisms driving the relationship between spatial heterogeneity and species richness at multiple scales. Disturbances such as fire affect landscape heterogeneity and are important influences on the distribution and abundance of biota across a range of scales. A key challenge for biodiversity conservation in fire-prone ecosystems is thus to understand the influence of fire on biotic communities.Contemporary ecological fire management resounds with the term 'pyrodiversity'. Efforts to achieve pyrodiversity are usually motivated by the rationale that increasing gamma diversity relies upon maintaining a mosaic of patches of different fire histories. From a global review of literature, this thesis revealed that despite widespread acceptance of this paradigm, the evidence supporting it is extremely sparse. This dearth of knowledge of how heterogeneity affects biota limits effective application of the mosaic burning approach. Studies that consider the spatial and temporal attributes of the fire regime mosaic, and investigate the relationship between these and multiple taxa at different spatial scales, are urgently required.To respond to this knowledge gap, this thesis investigated the effects of fire history and habitat heterogeneity on structure and composition of floral and avifaunal communities. This thesis tests hypotheses about the importance of variable fire regimes, spatial heterogeneity, extent of habitat, and local-and landscape-responses on birds and their habitat in the fire-prone sub-tropical woodlands of central Queensland. Two methods were used to collect the data: i) digital mapping and characterisation of the fire regime mosaic; and ii) surveys of woody vegetation and avifaunal communities.The post-fire response of vegetation reflects not only a single fire event but is the result of cumulative effects of previous fires in the landscape. Fire history categories based on unique combinations of time since last burn, fire frequency and season of last burn were developed and used to map the fire regime mosaic of the study area. This thesis establishes that fire history category strongly influences richness and abundance of mid-storey trees and of individual plants currently comprising the mid-level strata. The particular elements of fire history, time since fire and fire frequency, had the strongest influence on vegetation structure. A longer time since fire (> 4 years since last burn) combined with infrequent fires (< 2 fires in 12 year period) appeared to iii promote a dense mid-storey with the opposite conditions promoting more-open woodlands. This is of particular relevance for conservation management of woodland birds that have been shown to respond strongly to habitat structural variables in the study area.Landscape heterogeneity and extent of habitat are each expected to c...

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 63%

Drivers of diversity at the local- and landscape-scale in a fire-prone landscape

Burgess¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Indeed, the loss of woodlands on fertile soils has been implicated in the decline of species including the hooded robin (Melanodryas cucullata) and the regent honeyeater (Anthochaera phrygia) (Kvistad et al, 2015), while the importance of these productive habitats for a broader ensemble of declining woodland species in south-east Australia has been widely reported (Watson, 2011;Stevens & Watson, 2013;Bennett et al, 2014). Moreover, non-random habitat loss may indirectly act on woodland birds via the domination of fertile remnants by Manorina honeyeaters, which have a strong effect on the composition of bird communities in modified environments (Maron & Kennedy, 2007;Mac Nally et al, 2014a;Thomson et al, 2015). The (average) loss of one species from fertile and flat landscapes is noteworthy, and likely masks the far more severe disruption to the composition of communities in these landscapes.…”

Section: Landscapesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Simmonds¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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...

show abstract

“…Studies have shown that structural complexity of habitat strongly influences bird communities (Sekercioglu et al 2002, Maron andKennedy 2007), especially forest interior specialists and insectivores (Lee et al 2007, Greve et al 2011. These groups of birds use large and dead or rotting trees as foraging and nesting habitats (Shahabuddin and Kumar 2007).…”

Section: Effects Of Forest Use Practices On Avifaunamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consequently, most of the forest was destroyed and A variety of techniques have been employed to describe the characteristics of bird populations. These include radio-telemetry (Powell et al 2005), colour banding (Powlesland et al 2000, Rodewald et al 2013, distance sampling (Buckland 2001), fixed-radius pointcounts (Gregory et al 2004, Buckland 2006) and fixed-width transect-counts (Bibby et al 2000, Westbrooke et al 2003, Maron and Kennedy 2007. Both fixed-radius point-count and fixed-width transect-count methods are widely used to describe the species richness, relative abundance and densities of birds (Manuwal and Carey 1991, Buckland 2006Gregory et al 2004).…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As richness and abundance of forest birds are related to local-scale habitat structure (e.g Chettri et al 2002, Guenette andVillard 2005), the simplification of habitat as a result of forest disturbance is likely to affect the bird assemblages within a site (Cleary et al 2007, Maron and Kennedy 2007, Greve et al 2011. However, in this study, I found that the effects of forest disturbance on birds were not restricted only to the site level, as higher intensities of disturbance also negatively affected the landscape-level species richness of birds (Chapter 4).…”

Section: Forest Use Practices Can Have Detrimental Effects On Vegetatmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Effects of habitat extent and forest disturbance on bird communities in lowland nepal

Dahal¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Habitat loss and degradation are recognized as the major contributors to species decline and extinction, and therefore represent a key conservation challenge for biodiversity conservation. Key to the protection of biodiversity is acquisition of ecological knowledge about how anthropogenic forest disturbances affect species and how species respond to emergent landscape characteristics.Furthermore, it is also important to assess how different management approaches and land tenures influence retention of the biota of particular sites and of landscapes. However, this crucial ecological knowledge is yet to be obtained for the threatened lowland landscapes of Nepal.Protected areas cover only a small proportion of forests in lowland Nepal; the majority of forests outside the protected areas (off-reserve) have been managed by the state government. However, in recent years, community forestry programs have been increasingly popular as attempts to protect biodiversity while permitting consumptive forest use by people. It is therefore important to understand effectiveness of different forest management tenures for avifaunal conservation. I compared species richness, abundance, diversity and community composition of birds among sites in community forests, state forests and protected areas. Although sites in protected areas had the greatest richness of birds, community forests and state managed forests had complementary assemblages, supporting species not represented in protected areas. Vegetation characteristics such as large tree density, tree canopy cover and shrub density were also greater in community forests than in state-managed forests. The findings suggest that the community forestry approach appears to improve habitat quality compared to state-managed forests, and therefore can be an alternative tenure type for conservation of off-reserve forests and avifauna in the region.Subsistence forestry practices such as logging, lopping, and grazing are sources of forest disturbance in lowland Nepal. Such activities do not reduce forest area, but change habitat characteristics, potentially affecting biodiversity directly, and through interactions with landscape characteristics. I examined effects of forest use practices on species richness and abundance of forest birds, and whether landscape context such as the extent of forest cover moderates disturbance effects on birds. I found that extraction of forest products reduced forest structural complexity and altered the avifaunal community of a site. At the site level, large tree density, tree canopy cover and shrub density were important habitat characteristics, while the extent of forest cover in the landscape had the greatest influence on richness of birds. The effects of forest disturbance (livestock grazing and logging) intensity on birds depended on the extent of forest in the surrounding landscape, with strongest effects in sites with less surrounding forest. Thus, although iii site-level vegetation structure is important, maintenance of forest extent in the lan...

show abstract

Roads, fire and aggressive competitors: Determinants of bird distribution in subtropical production forests

Cited by 45 publications

References 31 publications

Drivers of diversity at the local- and landscape-scale in a fire-prone landscape

Drivers of diversity at the local- and landscape-scale in a fire-prone landscape

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

Effects of habitat extent and forest disturbance on bird communities in lowland nepal

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About