Wednesday, August 4, 2010

PS 64-165: Avian response to land use practices in the City of Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.A

Kelsey A. Molloy, University of Rhode Island, William B. Sutton, Alabama A&M University, and Yong Wang, Alabama A&M University.

Background/Question/Methods Urbanization is a serious issue affecting vertebrate conservation because it presents a wide variety of threats to macro-vertebrates and biodiversity. The goal of this research was to examine avian response to three different land use practices in the City of Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.A. We used ArcGIS to divide the city into three land use categories (urban, greenspace, and agriculture) and create random points within these categories. We completed aural and visual bird surveys of 12 minutes over three weeks at these points. We used analysis of variance (ANOVA) and linear regression to examine differences in avian compositions (e.g., migration status, species composition, biodiversity index, and foraging status) among land use types.

Results/Conclusions

We detected 1144 birds representing 69 species. We found significantly higher values for Shannon-Wiener index, species richness, number of unique species, and overall bird counts in agricultural land types, whereas we found a higher percentage of neo-tropical migrants within greenspace land types. In addition, we found that percentages of exotic species, residents, and ground gleaners all increased with increased urbanization. These findings illustrate the overall negative impacts of urbanization on native and breeding migratory songbird species, highlighting the importance of existing agricultural and forested habitats within a city limit for long-term bird conservation. To ensure conservation of native and breeding migratory songbird species, more studies are needed to understand the long-term impacts of urbanization on these species.


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