Birds and Land Classes in Young Forested Landscapes

摘要

In the Mississippi Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States, we explored relationships among bird speciesand vegetation types and landscape characteristics at four different scales. We modeled abundance of priority avianspecies from Breeding Bird Surveys using land class metrics at 0.24, 1, 3, and 5-km extents. Our modeling method waslogistic regression and model selection was based on Akaike’s Information Criteria and validation with reserved data.Northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus), red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus), northern parula (Parulaamericana), Swainson’s warbler (Limnothlypis swainsonii), prairie warbler (Dendroica discolor), hooded warbler (Wilsoniacitrina), and brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater) had models containing positive area or core area variables.White-eyed vireo (Vireo griseus) and gray catbird (Dumetella carolinensis) had models with a combination of area andedge associations at different scales. Acadian flycatcher (Empidonax virescens), red-bellied woodpecker (Melanerpescarolinus), wood thrush (Hylocichla mustelina), and yellow-breasted chat (Icteria virens) had positive edge density models.Modeling at different scales produced more complete habitat associations for most species and landscape variableswere more influential at larger extents than the smallest extent. Although Mississippi is heavily forested, the landscape isunexpectedly fragmented, with small areal extents of vegetation types. Managers should seek to provide large extents of avariety of habitats, including historically representative vegetation types such as low density pine, to support persistenceof a complete suite of avian species.