Effectiveness of protected areas for bird conservation depends on guild

Abstract

Aim: Protected areas are key conservation tools intended to increase biodiversity and reduce extinction risks of species and populations. However, the degree to which protected areas achieve their conservation goals is generally unknown for many protected areas worldwide. We assess the effect of protected areas on the abundance of 196 common, resident bird species. If protected areas were beneficial to avian biodiversity, we expect landscapes with a higher proportion of protected areas will have higher densities of species compared to landscapes with no protection.Location: Greater Gauteng region, South Africa. Methods:We analysed bird survey data collected over regular grid cells across the study area. We estimated bird abundance in relation to the proportion of a grid cell that was protected with the Royle-Nichols model and fitted the model once for each of the species. We examined variation in estimated abundance as a function of avian guild (defined by the type of food a species preferentially ate and its foraging mode) with a regression tree analysis. Results:Abundance was significantly positively related to the proportion of protected areas in grid cells for 26% of the species, significantly negatively related in 15%, and not significantly related in 59% species. We found three distinct guild groups which differed in their average abundance, after accounting for associated variance. Group 1 consisted of guilds frugivores, ground-feeders, hawkers, predators, and vegivores and average abundance was strongly positively related to the proportion of protected areas. Group 2 included granivores, and average abundance was strongly negatively related to proportion of protected areas. Group 3 included gleaners only, and average abundance was not related to proportion of protected areas. Main conclusion:We conclude that the network of protected areas within the greater Gauteng region sustained relatively higher abundances of common birds and thus perform an important conservation role. K E Y W O R D S Avian conservation, citizen science, hierarchical models, protected areas, species abundance B I OS K E TCH E S Gregory D. Duckworth has interests in conservation and ecological modelling. Res Altwegg's interests are in population ecology and statistical ecology.

Diversity, Endemism, Species Turnover and Relationships among Avifauna of Neotropical Seasonally Dry Forests

“…Much biodiversity still remains unprotected. Thus, studies describing basic diversity patterns are urgently required for the Neotropics because they provide baseline information that is relevant for both in-depth ecological studies on ecosystem dynamics and conservation planning (Rodríguez-Ferraro & Blake, 2008;Duckworth & Altwegg, 2018). From this perspective, contextualizing the avifaunistic relevance of each separate NSDF nucleus, we hope that our results become a basis for future ecological studies and conservation decisions that take into account continental-level faunistic patterns, in order to protect the maximum possible diversity of these highly threatened forests.…”

“…Considering that the financial resources available for biodiversity conservation are limited, information on species richness and endemism levels, including species turnover and the historical relationships among regions, have been identified as important metrics for estimating the conservation value of different areas (Myers et al, 2000;Gordon & Ornelas, 2000). Theoretically, regions or ecosystems containing the largest numbers of ecologically restricted species are the most sensitive to ecological disturbance and alteration; consequently, they must be considered as conservation priorities (Gordon & Ornelas, 2000;Duckworth & Altwegg, 2018). However, and despite there being numerous studies of NSDF plants (e.g., Pennington et al, 2000;Linares-Palomino et al, 2011;Banda et al, 2016), few studies have assessed the diversity patterns and historical relationships among the entire NSDF avifauna across the Americas (Ceballos, 1995;Stotz et al, 1996;Prieto-Torres et al, 2018b).…”

Using a large-scale biodiversity monitoring dataset to test the effectiveness of protected areas at conserving North-American breeding birds

“…For example, Devictor et al (2007) applied this approach to survey data on common birds across France to find a positive effect of PAs on bird abundances for half of the species investigated, especially declining species . Duckworth and Altwegg (2018), working on bird abundance data collected across South Africa, found that PA coverage was positively correlated with occupancy of frugivorous, insectivoro us, vegivores and predator species, and negatively correlated with occupancy of granivorous species.…”

Iberian Protected Areas Capture Regional Functional, Phylogenetic and Taxonomic Diversity of Most Tetrapod Groups

“…However, our results do not necessarily indicate that PAs are inefficiently protecting species that are important targets in conservation programs. Rather, they indicate that PAs are safeguarding species that are functional and/or phylogenetically close (e.g., habitat specialist species) or that belong to a particular guild (Duckworth and Altwegg, 2018), thus diverging from presumably generalist species that may occur outside the PAs. Therefore, if we are to achieve a high representation in the PAs of the regional functional and phylogenetic diversity, then it might be necessary to expand the current PAs in order to increase the amount of habitat heterogeneity under protection.…”