Community congruence of plants, invertebrates and birds in natural and constructed shallow open-water wetlands: Do we need to monitor multiple assemblages?

Application of weight method based on canonical correspondence analysis for assessment of Anatidae habitat suitability: A case study in East Dongting Lake, Middle China

“…1) throughout East Dongting Lake. Each site was investigated from 2006 to 2012 based on point counting (Rooney and Bayley, 2012). Samplings were conducted from November to February to record wintering species, and each site was sampled once or twice a year.…”

The accuracy of land cover-based wetland assessments is influenced by landscape extent

“…1). Earlier work in the Beaverhills watershed (e.g., Rooney and Bayley 2012;Wilson and Bayley 2012) determined that urban wetlands are typically more disturbed than those in agricultural or protected areas, so this gradient in biotic integrity was not unexpected. Yet, when we reran the GLM after factoring out the influence of location, our conclusions were unchanged.…”

“…The first was based on vegetation community data, the second on wetland-dependent songbird and shorebird community data (hereafter the Landscape Ecol bird-based IBI). Sampling followed methods outlined in Rooney and Bayley (2012), and occurred during the summers of 2008 and 2009. In brief, vegetation was sampled from six quadrats deployed within the wet meadow zone of each wetland in August, when peak biomass is expected.…”

“…Although simpler to obtain and interpret, such proxies may exclude important information pertinent to biotic integrity, introducing additional error into GIS-based assessments. For example, not all forms of disturbance can be expected to affect biotic integrity equally: urban or industrial development would likely have a stronger influence on the biotic condition of a nearby wetland than low-intensity agriculture (Forrest 2010;Rooney and Bayley 2012). Thus, our third objective was to contrast a model that predicts IBI scores from the percent of undisturbed land surrounding each wetland with more sophisticated models, derived from detailed land cover data, divided into 11 distinct land cover classes.…”

Impaired Wetlands in a Damaged Landscape

“…They concluded that a heterogeneous landscape supporting relatively large areas of natural forests and wetlands is required to maintain healthy wetlands. Rooney and Bayley (2012) examined the concordance between community assemblages (waterfowl, wetland dependent songbird, aquatic macroinvertebrate, and wet meadow, emergent, and open-water plants) across four treatments (natural reference, naturalized, agricultural, and stormwater wetlands) near Edmonton, Alberta. They observed positive relationships in 14 of 15 pairwise comparisons but relatively low concordance, which indicated that the assemblages were relatively poor surrogate indicators.…”