Effects of growth stage and tree species composition on breeding bird assemblages of plantation forests

Identifying practical indicators of biodiversity for stand-level management of plantation forests

“…The trends of hoverflies and birds were more coarse than that of vascular plants ( Fig. 4a; Wilson et al 2006). Richness of forest species in all taxonomic groups increased with forest maturity in Sitka spruce and ash forests, but again there were differences in scale of response (Fig.…”

“…Birds range over wider areas than members of any of the other taxa, and are therefore affected by environmental variation at the plantation and landscape scales (Pithon et al 2005). Species assemblages present in the sites surveyed are analysed in more detail in related work (French et al in press;Oxbrough et al 2005;Smith et al 2005;Wilson et al 2006). …”

“…Because of the low species diversity of birds in Ireland and the lack of forest specialists (Wilson et al 2006), the number of indicator bird species is low (Table 7). In fact most of the indicator species are common birds in Ireland and will be familiar to most non-specialists (Coombes et al 2002).…”

“…Therefore, a separate stand type classification was performed using the structural data from the bird point counts of ash and Sitka spruce forests combined. This resulted in three bird habitat subgroups, Younger, Intermediate and Older (Wilson et al 2006), corresponding to structural Stages I-II, Stages II-III and Stages III-V, respectively. Indicators for bird diversity were developed in the context of this simplified structural classification.…”

“…For further details on survey methodology, see French et al (in press) for vegetation, Oxbrough et al (2005) for spiders, Wilson et al (2006) for birds and Smith et al (2005) for all taxonomic groups, environmental and management data and overall study design. Nomenclature follows for mosses, Stace (1997) for vascular plants and Beaman (1994) for birds.…”