Post-burn and long-term fire effects on plants and birds in floodplain wetlands of the Russian Far East

Chowdhury

et al. 2021

Front. Ecol. Evol.

Self Cite

With nearly 400 migratory landbird species, the East Asian Flyway is the most diverse of the world’s flyways. This diversity is a consequence of the varied ecological niches provided by biomes ranging from broadleaf forests to arctic tundra and accentuated by complex biogeographic processes. The distribution and migration ecology of East Asian landbirds is still inadequately known, but a recent explosion in the number of studies tracking the migration of raptors, cuckoos, kingfishers and passerines has greatly increased our knowledge about the stopover and wintering ecology of many species, and the migratory routes that link northeast Eurasia and the Asian tropics. Yet the East Asian Flyway also supports the highest number of threatened species among flyways. Strong declines have been detected in buntings (Emberizidae) and other long-distance migrants. While the conservation of migratory landbirds in this region has largely focused on unsustainable hunting, there are other threats, such as habitat loss and increased agro-chemical use driven directly by land cover change and climate-related processes. Important knowledge gaps to be addressed include (1) threats affecting species in different parts of their annual cycle, (2) range-wide population trends, (3) ecological requirements and habitat use during the non-breeding season, and (4) the conservation status of critical wintering sites (including understudied farming landscapes, such as rice fields) and migration bottlenecks along the flyway.

Section: Threats To Migratory Landbirdsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The State of Migratory Landbirds in the East Asian Flyway: Distributions, Threats, and Conservation Needs

Yong¹,

Chowdhury

et al. 2021

Front. Ecol. Evol.

Self Cite

“…Furthermore, we found that areas, which burned no more than two times within the last 18 years, were more likely to be found in the home ranges of Amur Falcons, compared to habitats that have been affected by fire more frequently. The greater proportion of habitats burned more frequently within the radius around empty nests can be either attributed to the greater amount of wetlands therein, as wetlands burn more frequent in our study area (Heim et al, 2019), or proof avoidance behavior. Early breeding species like magpies or Northern Long-eared Owls will most likely abandon their nest during a spring fire, while late-arriving species (i.e., arrival after the spring fire season) might avoid nests in burned trees, as they might be less concealed due to missing leaves.…”

Section: Ecological Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…Subsequently, buffers were intersected with the habitat classification map to obtain the particular set of habitat patches around each nest. With the help of a fire frequency map (Heim et al, ), we tested for an influence of fire on the species occurrence.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Land use intensification and climate change may restrict potential habitats and numbers of this species (Pietersen & Symes, ; Symes & Woodborne, ). Man‐made fires occur on a regular basis in the floodplain of the Amur river, and those events probably act as a limiting factor for breeding birds in the study area (Heim et al, ). Since Amur Falcons depend on the availability of nests built by other birds, it remains unclear, if there are further aspects of the environment such as landscape structure or characteristics of the nest itself that influence the choice of their breeding site (Zhou et al, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Breeding habitat and nest‐site selection by an obligatory “nest‐cleptoparasite”, the Amur FalconFalco amurensis

Frommhold

Barabanov

et al. 2019

Ecology and Evolution

Self Cite

The selection of a nest site is crucial for successful reproduction of birds. Animals which re‐use or occupy nest sites constructed by other species often have limited choice. Little is known about the criteria of nest‐stealing species to choose suitable nesting sites and habitats. Here, we analyze breeding‐site selection of an obligatory “nest‐cleptoparasite”, the Amur Falcon Falco amurensis. We collected data on nest sites at Muraviovka Park in the Russian Far East, where the species breeds exclusively in nests of the Eurasian Magpie Pica pica. We sampled 117 Eurasian Magpie nests, 38 of which were occupied by Amur Falcons. Nest‐specific variables were assessed, and a recently developed habitat classification map was used to derive landscape metrics. We found that Amur Falcons chose a wide range of nesting sites, but significantly preferred nests with a domed roof. Breeding pairs of Eurasian Hobby Falco subbuteo and Eurasian Magpie were often found to breed near the nest in about the same distance as neighboring Amur Falcon pairs. Additionally, the occurrence of the species was positively associated with bare soil cover, forest cover, and shrub patches within their home range and negatively with the distance to wetlands. Areas of wetlands and fallow land might be used for foraging since Amur Falcons mostly depend on an insect diet. Additionally, we found that rarely burned habitats were preferred. Overall, the effect of landscape variables on the choice of actual nest sites appeared to be rather small. We used different classification methods to predict the probability of occurrence, of which the Random forest method showed the highest accuracy. The areas determined as suitable habitat showed a high concordance with the actual nest locations. We conclude that Amur Falcons prefer to occupy newly built (domed) nests to ensure high nest quality, as well as nests surrounded by available feeding habitats.

“…Our results demonstrate that the floodplains of Muraviovka Park provide large areas of sufficient breeding ground, especially for the Ochre-rumped Bunting and the Black-faced Bunting, among many others [38]. Overall, monitoring protected areas and their surroundings is essential given their vulnerability to anthropogenic pressures, including those associated to climate change, fires, and agriculture [72,73]. Our presented framework could furthermore be used to estimate population sizes for larger areas, to get a better understanding of the current situation for endangered taxa such as the Yellow-breasted Bunting.…”

Section: Management Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Combining Multiband Remote Sensing and Hierarchical Distance Sampling to Establish Drivers of Bird Abundance

Richter

et al. 2019

Remote Sensing

Self Cite

Information on habitat preferences is critical for the successful conservation of endangered species. For many species, especially those living in remote areas, we currently lack this information. Time and financial resources to analyze habitat use are limited. We aimed to develop a method to describe habitat preferences based on a combination of bird surveys with remotely sensed fine-scale land cover maps. We created a blended multiband remote sensing product from SPOT 6 and Landsat 8 data with a high spatial resolution. We surveyed populations of three bird species (Yellow-breasted Bunting Emberiza aureola, Ochre-rumped Bunting Emberiza yessoensis, and Black-faced Bunting Emberiza spodocephala) at a study site in the Russian Far East using hierarchical distance sampling, a survey method that allows to correct for varying detection probability. Combining the bird survey data and land cover variables from the remote sensing product allowed us to model population density as a function of environmental variables. We found that even small-scale land cover characteristics were predictable using remote sensing data with sufficient accuracy. The overall classification accuracy with pansharpened SPOT 6 data alone amounted to 71.3%. Higher accuracies were reached via the additional integration of SWIR bands (overall accuracy = 73.21%), especially for complex small-scale land cover types such as shrubby areas. This helped to reach a high accuracy in the habitat models. Abundances of the three studied bird species were closely linked to the proportion of wetland, willow shrubs, and habitat heterogeneity. Habitat requirements and population sizes of species of interest are valuable information for stakeholders and decision-makers to maximize the potential success of habitat management measures.the effectiveness of conservation interventions [1,3]. Yet, despite the rapid global decline in species richness and abundance over the past decades [4,5], a major challenge in conservation ecology is our limited knowledge on the population sizes and habitat preferences of animal species in understudied regions [6][7][8]. Here, the use of remote sensing data to predict species distributions and abundances is vital to improve large-scale biodiversity monitoring and species conservation [2,3,9].Optical remote sensing is often suggested as a powerful tool to assist with the mapping of protected habitats and vegetation. Moreover, spaceborne remote sensing offers the opportunity to map larger areas in a systematic, repeatable, and spatially exhaustive manner [10,11]. Apart from the spatial extent of the data, its grain or spatial resolution is another relevant issue of spatial scale. Ideally, the pixel resolution of remotely sensed and considered environmental data (e.g., information on habitat features) should match to model their relationships [12]. For example, the classical multispectral configuration of Landsat-4 to Landsat-8 provides a pixel size of 30 × 30 m and an image extent of 185 × 185 km. This allows linking Landsat data to en...