Volunteer birdwatching survey shows effects of temperatures on population of Jays

Date: April 9, 2019

Source: University of Southampton

A study led by researchers at the University of Southampton has used data collected by volunteer bird watchers to study how the importance of wildlife habitat management for British birds depends on changing temperatures.

The team studied data from the British Trust for Ornithology's "Bird Atlas 2007 -- 11" on the abundance of Eurasian jays over the whole of Great Britain. The University of Southampton researchers focused on jays for this trial as they are a species of bird known to frequent a mixture of different natural environments.

The findings, published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, showed that an even range of habitats -- forests fields and meadows -- are needed in an area of around 200m2 to 1km2 in order for the jays to thrive. An even spread of coniferous and broad leaved forests within this space is also necessary. The data showed that in higher temperatures it is even more important for the jays to have this mix of different surroundings in a relatively small space.

The Bird Atlas 2007 -- 11 was one of the most ambitious volunteer projects undertaken. Volunteers for the British Trust for Ornithology were allocated squares of land around the country in which they counted every bird they spotted during winter and in the breeding season.

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Without habitat management, small land parcels do not protect birds

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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