No abstract

Article Impact Statement: Protecting natural areas and improving the quality of anthropogenic landscapes as habitat are both needed to achieve effective conservation.

Summary The Wood Snipe Gallinago nemoricola is one of the least known shorebird species, and its habitat associations are very poorly understood. Here we provide the first assessment of the habitat use of the Wood Snipe during the breeding season. Between May and July 2021 at a 4-km2 alpine meadow in Sichuan province, China, we conducted population surveys and behavioural observations to identify sites where breeding Wood Snipe occurred and foraged. We quantified the habitat characteristics and food resource availability of these sites and compared them with randomly selected “background” sites. Comparison between 34 occurrence sites and 25 background sites indicated that during the breeding season, Wood Snipes are not distributed evenly across alpine meadow habitats, but preferred habitats in the lower part (3,378–3,624 m) of the alpine meadow with intermediate levels of soil moisture. In addition, comparison between 17 foraging sites and 24 background sites showed that the Wood Snipe tended to forage at sites with higher soil fauna abundance. We found weak evidence for denser vegetation cover at its height and no evidence for other biotic habitat variables such as vegetation composition or other abiotic habitat variables such as slope, soil penetrability, or disturbance level to influence Wood Snipe habitat associations. Our results suggest that the actual distribution range of the Wood Snipe during the breeding season may be smaller than expected from the extent of apparently suitable habitat. We advise caution in evaluating the potential habitat availability and distribution of the Wood Snipe, and call for further research to better understand the ecology of this rare species to inform its conservation.

Background Artificial forest can have great potential in serving as habitat to wildlife, depending on different management methods. As the state-owned forest farms now play a new role in ecological conservation in China, the biological richness of this kind of land-use type is understudied. Once owned by a mining company, a largest state-owned forest farm, Jingxi Forest Farm, has been reformed to be a state-owned forest farm with the purpose of conservation since 2017. Although this 116.4 km2 forest farm holds a near-healthy montaine ecosystem very representative in North China, a large proportion of artificial coniferous forest in the forest farm has been proven to hold less biodiversity than natural vegetation. This situation, however, provides a great opportunity for ecological restoration and biodiversity conservation. Therefore, from November 2019 to December 2020, we conducted a set of biodiversity surveys, whose results will serve as a baseline for further restoration and conservation. New information Here, we report the result of a multi-taxa fauna diversity survey conducted in Jingxi Forest Farm mainly in year 2020 with explicit spatial information. It is the first survey of its kind conducted in this area, revealing a total of 19 species of mammals, 86 birds, four reptiles, two amphibians and one fish species, as well as 101 species of insects. Four species of mammals are identified as data-poor species as they have less than 100 occurrence records with coordination in the GBIF database. One species of insect, representing one new provincial record genus of Beijing, is reported.