Avian community structure of urban parks in developed and new growth areas: A landscape-scale study in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Urban development affects avian community structure dramatically, and is considered a major cause of native species extinction. Hong Kong is a highly urbanized city, but there is a paucity of data on its urban avian community or the differences between areas with different development history and human population density. We assessed the impacts of urban development on bird community, and the effects of landscape-scale habitat factors at two scales. We selected 30 urban parks from areas of two development types as sampling sites. We censused bird communities in the breeding and wintering seasons in 2010–2011. Communities in the developed areas were more heterogeneous than those in the new growth areas. Regarding species groups, residents dominated urban parks in both development types, and introduced species were only recorded in the developed areas. More granivores, but fewer insectivores and insectivore–frugivores appeared in the developed areas than in the new growth areas which supported more forest-specialist birds when compared with the developed areas which had more open-habitat species. Contrastingly, bird communities were more nested in the new growth areas. Although there were no significant differences in species richness, diversity and composition between the two development types, bird communities were very different in terms of species evenness, species groups and nestedness. Based on Nonmetric Multidimensional Scaling, bird distribution pattern were strongly associated with habitat evenness and largest patch index for woodland at the 400-m scale and contagion index at the 400- and 1000-m scales in the two development types.