Analysis on Bird Communities Response to Different Urban Land-Cover and Land-Use Types in Greater Manchester

Abstract

AbstractNowadays the process of global urbanization is unstoppable, leading to a serious threat to local biodiversity. Urbanization may result in biodiversity decline or even species extinction, while sometimes help maintain species abundance in some developed countries. Different land-cover and land-use types affect species diversity in different aspects and directions, so it’s important to understand the pattern of species distribution across different characteristics of urban landscape, which helps city-designers and decision-makers to mitigate detrimental influences of urbanization on local biodiversity by rational urban planning and effective conservation protection. This study uses bird, which are highly sensitive to environmental changes, as the ecological indicators.This paper studies the differences of species richness, abundance and community composition from five urban land-cover and seven land-use types, and analyses patterns of bird distribution in different land use purposes on the same land cover landscape. This study used bird species richness, Shannon and Simpson diversity index across Greater Manchester to evaluate bird diversity. This study also used Generalized Linear Model to model the relationship between bird species richness and land-cover or land-use density, and used Redundancy Analysis (RDA) to interpret the response of bird communities to land-cover and land-use density. Green spaces (especially for public parks land use) and water bodies have relatively higher bird species richness. Built areas have the lowest species richness, especially the institutional land use (including religious grounds, school grounds, and institutional grounds). Considering different land-use purposes, public parks and recreation have the highest bird diversity in green spaces land-cover, followed by amenity land and domestic gardens. In built-up areas, species diversity in institutional land use is higher than previously developed land use. Clear understanding the relationships between land-cover and land-use types and bird species diversity and communities composition will help better policy making for potential future land-cover and land-use planning.KeywordsSpatial ecologyAvianGreater ManchesterSpecies richnessLand coverLand use