How do forest bird communities change along the urban-rural gradient?
As we travel from outlying rural areas toward the city, it’s clear that there’s an urban gradient of increasing roads, buildings, and parking lots. For conservation planners and resource managers working to conserve species, a key question is what happens to the habitat value of undeveloped land as we move along the rural-urban gradient. A new study tackles that question with respect to forest bird communities in the Raleigh-Durham Triangle of North Carolina. Specifically, study authors Emily Minor and Dean Urban wanted to answer three questions about bird communities in undeveloped woodlots in the region: 1) Does community composition of forest birds change across a gradient of urban development? 2) If so, what are the important variables driving these changes? 3) From a management perspective, can urban forests be useful habitat for conservation of native species? To answer these questions, the researchers collected data from 272 point counts from 2002-2005 in city, county, and state
