Abstract
The interaction between environmental stressors may be a greater threat to biota than any individual ecological threat on its own. Land-use change and inappropriate fire regimes are known to pose great challenges to biodiversity conservation worldwide. Despite much research being conducted into their singular impacts on ecosystems, very few have investigated how their interaction may be affecting the biota of a region. We used data from surveys in 1998/2000 and 2019/2020 to compare the feeding guild assemblages of bird communities in different habitats within the greater Darwin region. By compiling two sets of spatial data, land-use change, and fire history mapping, we were able to investigate their interaction and impact on the avian assemblages in the Darwin urban area. Using Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) we found that an increase in urbanization significantly affected fire occurrence across study sites. Furthermore, we found that the interaction between land-use change and fire regimes had a significant effect on species that primarily feed on fruit. We conclude that while an increase in urbanization did not directly affect the avian assemblages, the impact of land-use change on the fire regimes indirectly impacted urban bird community structures.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e10239 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-16 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Ecology and Evolution |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jul 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors wish to thank Andrew Silcox and BirdLife Australia for providing Bird Atlas data. Thanks also go to the Palmerston City Council and the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory for their support and guidance during bird surveying. S. Fischer would like to thank Robert Fischer for assistance when gathering survey data. This paper resulted from research undertaken as part of a larger Ph.D. project that was supported by Charles Darwin University and the Australian Government via the Research Training Programme Stipend Scholarship. Open access publishing facilitated by Charles Darwin University, as part of the Wiley – Charles Darwin University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.
Funding Information:
The authors wish to thank Andrew Silcox and BirdLife Australia for providing Bird Atlas data. Thanks also go to the Palmerston City Council and the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory for their support and guidance during bird surveying. S. Fischer would like to thank Robert Fischer for assistance when gathering survey data. This paper resulted from research undertaken as part of a larger Ph.D. project that was supported by Charles Darwin University and the Australian Government via the Research Training Programme Stipend Scholarship. Open access publishing facilitated by Charles Darwin University, as part of the Wiley – Charles Darwin University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
