Land ownership patterns associated with declining forest birds: targeting the right policy and management for the right birds

Abstract

SUMMARYFor over a century the foundation of biological conservation has been the development of open space networks either through outright public land acquisition or appropriate management of private lands. Because both approaches come with significant trade-offs, it is critical to understand which species are found across various land ownership types so that policy tools and management actions can efficiently be targeted to do the most good. In this paper, presence-only biological data were used to create species distribution maps for 18 imperilled forest bird species that breed within the deciduous forests of New Jersey (USA). These maps, combined with publicly available, spatially explicit information on land ownership, document who owns the habitat relied on by each of these 18 species. There were significant variations in both species- and guild-specific reliance on public versus private lands, with the latter preferentially supporting nearly twice as many species as the former. Subcategories of land ownership provided support for the role of both state-owned forests and privately-owned agricultural lands in forest bird conservation; however, each landownership type supports a distinct set of species. While explicitly recognizing the need to employ diverse conservation strategies, the approach provides a solid framework for structuring forest conservation planning and policy at regional scales.

Effects of cost metric on cost‐effectiveness of protected‐area network design in urban landscapes

“…Maslo et al. () found that the distribution of predicted habitat for our focal species is split evenly between publicly and privately owned forests.…”

“…All the distribution models on which the maps are based provide a statistically reasonable depiction of the distribution of our focal species across our study area (AUC >0.70 [Maslo et al. ]). To provide a conservative estimate of where we believe each species is located the maps depicted only the top 10th percentile of probability of occurrence of all species in each of the 898,029 planning units.…”

“…A principal requirement of conservation planning is to be able to designate planning units as habitat for the focal species. To do this, we used previously published species distribution maps (100‐m spatial resolution) for each of our 17 birds built from over 1300 point‐count locations across our study area (Phillips et al ; Maslo et al ). All the distribution models on which the maps are based provide a statistically reasonable depiction of the distribution of our focal species across our study area (AUC >0.70 [Maslo et al.…”

“…To do this, we used previously published species distribution maps (100-m spatial resolution) for each of our 17 birds built from over 1300 point-count locations across our study area (Phillips et al 2006;Maslo et al 2015). All the distribution models on which the maps are based provide a statistically reasonable depiction of the distribution of our focal species across our study area (AUC >0.70 [Maslo et al 2015]). To provide a conservative estimate of where we believe each species is located the maps depicted only the top 10th percentile of probability of occurrence of all species in each of the 898,029 planning units.…”

Future Developments Without Targeted Policies

“…Land ownership has implications for land management and can therefore have implications for biodiversity residing on it. For example, private versus publicly owned lands have different bird species compositions (Maslo, Lockwood and Leu 2015) and private temperate forests contain a greater diversity and density of microhabitats that can support greater biodiversity (Johann and Schaich 2016). Over one-quarter of the whole terrestrial land surface is managed or under the tenure rights of indigenous groups and this land intersects with approximately 40 per cent of protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes (Garnett et al 2018).…”