Browsing by Author "Lin, Fang-yee"

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    'Islands' in an island: multiscale effects of forest fragmentation on lowland forest birds in Taiwan
    Lin, Fang-yee (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-12)
    Intensive agricultural developments and increasing human population has caused severe lowland-forest loss and fragmentation in the western coastal plain in Taiwan over the past centuries. The goal of this study is to explore the multiscale impacts of forest fragmentation on species richness and community composition of lowland-forest birds in Taiwan. At a regional scale, Island Biogeography Theory was applied to examine area and isolation effects on species richness of lowland-forest birds using bird data derived from Breeding Bird Survey Taiwan in 2009 and 2010. I also investigate the differential responses of two functional groups (forest specialists and generalists) to area and isolation effects Furthermore, I examine the relative influences of environmental variables at regional, landscape and local scales on avian community indices and composition in northern Taiwan with a hierarchical multiscale approach. Finally, species vulnerable to forest fragmentation and the ecological traits associated with specie vulnerability to forest fragmentation were identified. Only forest specialist species responded to the regional-scale area and isolation effects. The species richness of forest specialists increased with the size of forest islands, and the community similarity of forest specialist species declined with increasing the distance from the sources of immigrants. Structurally isolated forests may not function as real habitat patches from the view of forest generalists because of their flexibility in utilizing the non-forest matrix. After accounting for the influences of environmental variables at other spatial scales, the regional-scale isolation effect still played a key role in determining avian community composition based on the  presence/absence data set. But local-scale forest condition also explained a considerable amount of variability in the presence/absence data set. The regional-scale isolation effect, however, didn't show significant influences on community composition based on the abundance data set. In contrast, the landscape-scale variables explained the largest amount of variability in the abundance data set at the entire community level. There were six bird species (Parus varius, Dicrurus aeneus, Treron sieboldii, Pericrocotu solaris, Erporniszan tholeuca and Alcippe brunnea) whose occurrence and abundance were both vulnerable to forest fragmentation. Habitat specialization was the ecological traits most strongly associated with their vulnerability