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Biblioteca Landscape‐scale habitat availability, and not local geography, predicts migratory landbird stopover across the Gulf of Maine

Landscape‐scale habitat availability, and not local geography, predicts migratory landbird stopover across the Gulf of Maine

Landscape‐scale habitat availability, and not local geography, predicts migratory landbird stopover across the Gulf of Maine

Resource information

Date of publication
Dezembro 2015
Resource Language
ISBN / Resource ID
AGRIS:US201500226006
Pages
395-405

While it is clear that many migratory behaviors are shared across taxa, generalizable models that predict the distribution and abundance of migrating taxa at the landscape scale are rare. In migratory landbirds, ephemeral concentrations of refueling birds indicate that individual behaviors sometimes produce large epiphenomena in particular geographic locations. Identifying landscape factors that predict the distribution and abundance of birds during migratory stopover will both improve our understanding of the migratory process and assist in broad, regionally relevant conservation. In this study we used autumnal passerine stopover data from a five‐year period and eleven stopover sites across coastal Maine, USA, to test four broad hypotheses of migrant distribution and abundance that have been supported in other regions: a) the community characteristics of the pool of potential migrants, b) a site's local geography, c) landscape composition and configuration measured at different spatial scales, and d) interactions between these factors. Our final model revealed that birds concentrate at ‘habitat islands’, sites that possess a disproportionate percentage of the vegetated habitat in the 4‐km surrounding landscape. The strength of this pattern, however, was inversely proportional to a species' remaining migratory distance. Our results corroborate several studies that emphasize the importance of land cover composition at finer spatial scales (

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Authors and Publishers

Author(s), editor(s), contributor(s)

McCabe, Jennifer D.
Olsen, Brian J.

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Data Provider
Geographical focus