Date: January 22, 2019
Source: Penn State
Designating
relatively small parcels of land as protected areas for wildlife with no
habitat management -- which has frequently been done in urban-suburban locales
around the world -- likely does not benefit declining songbird species,
according to a team of researchers who studied a long-protected northeastern
virgin forest plot.
They
reached their conclusion after comparing bird population data collected in the
1960s in Hutcheson Memorial Forest, a unique, uncut 40-acre tract owned by
Rutgers University in central New Jersey, to bird numbers found there in recent
years. In the 1950s, when Rutgers received the land, a deed restriction
explicitly prohibited habitat and wildlife management.
This
single site is very typical of protected areas established in the last decade
worldwide, researchers noted, because 68 percent of the 35,694 terrestrial
protected areas added to the World Protected Area Network from 2007 to 2017 are
of equal or smaller size to Hutcheson Memorial Forest.
In the
study, researchers tracked bird compositional changes using a
"within-season repeat sampling protocol." Using the same locations
and methods employed 40 years before to collect birds, researchers documented
species gains and losses through time. Using national Breeding Bird Survey
data, they also contrasted songbird numbers in the protected area to the
surrounding region's bird population.
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