Research by the Ministry of Agriculture’s Taiwan Biodiversity Research Institute suggests that the richness of bird species increases with landscape heterogeneity.
A research team from the institute analyzed how landscape heterogeneity and total habitat area affect the number of bird species based on data from the Taiwan Breeding Bird Survey.
The results showed a significant hump-shaped association of bird species with forest and farmland coverage, meaning that a balanced proportion of diverse land cover types, such as a mixture of farms and forests, would attract the most bird species, the institute said.
Photo courtesy of the Cieding Visitors’ Association
For example, the Tianliaoyang Wetland (田寮洋濕地) in New Taipei City and its surrounding forests have documented visits of more than 100 bird species within a single day every year, it said.
For forest birds, the number of bird species rose with the total area of forests regardless of the size of the survey area, which ranged from a radius of 100m and 500m to 1km and 2km, the institute said.
However, the richness of farmland birds increased significantly with the total farmland area only when the survey area was limited to a radius of 100m, it said.
“Within a radius of 100m, farmland boosts bird species diversity, whether it is a single large farm or multiple small farms,” the institute said.
The results also showed that Taiwan’s alien bird species, or introduced birds, preferred fragmented landscapes, as their richness increased with edge density, an indicator used to measure the configurational heterogeneity of a landscape, it said.
The team is now researching frog habitats using the same method to examine whether frog species diversity is also significantly linked to landscape heterogeneity, the institute said, adding that the goal is to propose a more comprehensive strategy to help preserve biodiversity.
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