The potential role of drove roads as connecting corridors for birds between Natura 2000 sites
Entity
UAM. Departamento de EcologíaPublisher
MDPIDate
2021-09-15Citation
10.3390/birds2030023
Birds 2.3 (2021): 314-328
ISSN
2673-6004DOI
10.3390/birds2030023Project
Comunidad de Madrid. P2018/EMT-4338/Remedinal TE-CMEditor's Version
https://doi.org/10.3390/birds2030023Subjects
Agrarian Landscapes; Connectivity; Fragmentation; Green Infrastructure; Habitat; Human Impac; Metacommunities; Nestedness; Urban Ecology; Biología y Biomedicina / BiologíaRights
© 2021 by the authorsAbstract
Ecological connectivity among protected Natura 2000 sites is a priority for conservation
in Europe due to the increasing pressure on biodiversity from human activities and climate change.
Drove roads, the traditional paths used to move livestock through the territory, have been proposed
as potential ecological corridors due to their large extent, continuous nature and centennial protection
from ploughing and urbanization, which allows the persistence of some tree cover and natural
habitats in them. Bird communities were sampled during the reproductive season along 19 drove
road transects in agrarian landscapes between Natura 2000 sites, all of them around the conurbation
of Madrid (Madrid Region, Spain). Bird community nestedness was assessed by NODF computation
followed by significance estimation by aleatorization, and factors explaining species richness and
bird abundance were analyzed through General Linear Models fitted with environmental variables
measured on official vegetation maps and orthophotos. Bird communities in drove roads were
significantly nested, showing high predictability in the order of species loss from better preserved
sites to those under stronger environmental pressures. Accordingly, Poisson regression showed bird
richness to decrease strongly with distance from the closest Natura 2000 site and to increase with
forest cover at the landscape and at the drove road scales. Bird abundance increased strongly with
distance from urban areas and motorways, and it was slightly higher in areas with more forest cover
and in transects with less bare ground. These results, and the higher relevance detected for landscape
scale variables (500 m around transects) than for those at the drove road (50 m) scale, show that
(i) they can only play a secondary role as habitat for nesting birds but (ii) they may add to the Green
Infrastructure strategy as facilitators or stepping stones for bird communities if the surrounding
landscape is favorable for them
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Google Scholar:Malo Arrazola, Juan Esteban
-
Mata Estacio, Cristina
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