Adaptation of bird communities to farmland abandonment in a mountain landscape.

ABSTRACT: Widespread farmland abandonment has led to significant landscape transformations of many European mountain areas. These semi-natural multi-habitat landscapes are important reservoirs of biodiversity and their abandonment has important conservation implications. In multi-habitat landscapes the adaptation of communities depends on the differential affinity of the species to the available habitats. We use nested species-area relationships (SAR) to model species richness patterns of bird communities across scales in a mountain landscape, in NW Portugal. We compare the performance of the classic-SAR and the countryside-SAR (i.e. multi-habitat) models at the landscape scale, and compare species similarity decay (SSD) at the regional scale. We find a considerable overlap of bird communities in th

SUBMITTER: Guilherme JL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3759457 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature