Construction methods of urban ecological corridor for birds: A review

Abstract

The ecological corridors considering bird movement characteristics and habitat requirements would mitigate species extinction caused by habitat loss or habitat fragmentation and facilitate species gene dispersal and exchange. These functions may in turn benefit urban residents' physical and mental health as well as appreciation of real estates. Nonetheless, main ecological corridor construction methods developed by foreign scholars have not internally considered the movement and habitat characteristics of birds, while corridor research for birds by domestic scholars have focused on explorations of foreign technical methods yet lacked enough knowledge on studied birds' characteristics. Therefore, there is still much room for improvement in the study of urban ecological corridor construction from the perspective of birds. Based on the analyses of domestic and foreign related research from 1975 to 2020, we identified seven corridor construction methods and three corridor optimization methods within which bird ecology can be integrated. The advantages, drawbacks, and applicable scenarios of all the methods were explored accordingly. Finally, we argued that the develop-ment of computational models, which could not only combine bird species' observation data and spatial movement data with landscape structures but could also possess efficient computation power as well as simulate corridor's ecological benefits, would be a trend for constructing ecological corridor for birds.