Effects of environmental factors on avian communities in urban parks in small- to medium-sized city: a case study of Fuyang City, Anhui, China

Abstract

With a worldwide expansion of urbanization, the conservation of urban biodiversity is attracting growing attention. It is of great signi cance to study the relationship between wildlife and urban landscape. The purpose of this study is to explore the signi cance of vegetation and landscape factors in biodiversity conservation through changes in bird communities. In this study, we focused on 31 parks in the urban area of Fuyang city in the North China Plain. A total of 8795 individual birds from 69 species were recorded. The study found that (a) at the local level, tree diversity and heights are the most important factors contributing to each level of bird diversity, followed by the coverage of shrubs and herbs; (b) at the landscape level, the proportion of woodland has a strong positive correlation with the multidimensional diversity of birds, followed by the patch diversity and percent of grassland. Our results showed that arti cial control of green space structure can effectively increase bird diversity. Increasing the area of urban green space, and at the same time, increasing the proportion of woodland, shrubs, herbs and water in urban parks can provide diverse habitats for birds, thereby improving bird diversity, proves that biodiversity indicators are of great signi cance in landscape planning.