Early responses of birds to clearfelling and its alternatives in lowland wet eucalypt forest in Tasmania, Australia

Abstract

The impacts on bird assemblages of silvicultural alternatives to clearfelling in lowland wet eucalypt forest were studied over a decade at Warra, Tasmania. Using a multiple-visit point-count procedure and a before-after-control-impact design, indices of relative incidence were derived for the 44 bird species recorded at 177 survey-points, and used in both univariate and multivariate analyses. The majority of species had strong associations with either mature forest or young regeneration post-harvest, with very few more generalist species present. Bird assemblages in the unharvested mature forest were not static over this period, but this could not readily be explained by the expansion of forest harvesting in the surrounding landscape. However, the shift was subtle compared to the responses to harvesting, which induced a fundamental change in assemblage composition irrespective of the silvicultural system applied. The ability of the different systems to retain elements of the original mature forest avifauna varied markedly. Dispersed retention silviculture was no better than clearfelling, with or without unharvested understorey islands in the latter system. By contrast, both the unharvested parts of coupes subjected to stripfelling, and the retained aggregates in coupes subjected to aggregated retention silviculture, maintained mature forest bird assemblages. The long-term value of stripfelling for mature forest avifauna is compromised because the unharvested strips will be harvested mid-rotation. Aggregated retention silviculture, however, is designed for long-term retention of mature forest in aggregates, and our results suggest that this system may offer a means of sustaining mature forest bird assemblages at the coupe-level. However, individual mature forest species varied in their degree of tolerance, and we suggest that no system is completely resilient to harvesting effects.