Avian Diversity Responds Unimodally to Natural Landcover: Implications for Conservation Management.

ABSTRACT: Predicting species' ecological responses to landcovers within landscapes could guide conservation practices. Current modelling efforts derived from classic species-area relationships almost always predict richness monotonically increasing as the proportion of landcovers increases. Yet evidence to explain hump-shaped richness-landcover patterns is lacking. We tested predictions related to hypothesised drivers of peaked relationships between richness and proportion of natural landcover. We estimated richness from breeding bird atlases at different spatial scales (25 to 900 km²) in New York State and Southern Ontario. We modelled richness to gradients of natural landcover, temperature, and landcover heterogeneity. We controlled models for sampling effort and regional size of the sp

SUBMITTER: De Camargo RX 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10451700 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature