Ecological structure of the avifauna composition as a basis for assessment of its heterogeneity and dynamics

Abstract

The article describes the methodological approach and the results of classification of breeding bird species in Belarus by their preference for habitat type during the breeding season based on this approach. During the classification process, we took into account the preferences developed in the course of evolution, i. e. those that had been the most characteristic of the species before the domination of altered territories and the escalation of an urbanization rate, as well as before many species started living in urban environments on a large scale.In total, we defined six ornithofaunistic complexes (forest, arboreal-shrub, water-coastal, marsh, dry open spaces and synanthropic) that include all 223 bird species that have been observed breeding in Belarus since 2000. In most cases, the ornithofaunistic complexes were further divided into clusters that reflect a prominent ecological differentiation of species, although less drastic than a difference between the complexes themselves. In controversial or debatable cases, to justify attributing a species to a certain ornithofaunistic complex, we compared and analyzed all available data on the occurrence and breeding density of the species. Most breeding bird species belong to forest and water-coastal ornithofaunistic complexes (80 and 64 species, respectively), while only 12 species belong to the ornithofaunistic complex of dry open spaces. This classification proves to be a convenient tool to estimate the size and nature of the changes in the ecological structure of bird assemblages that have undergone some interference or transformations in time as well as to get comparable ecological characteristics of bird populations in different territories.