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Avian Research 2015, 6(1): 10 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40657-015-0019-9
Research | Open Access | Issue | Published: 15 June 2015

Bird guild loss and its determinants on subtropical land-bridge islands, China

Show Author's Information Zhifeng Ding1,2,  Kenneth James Feeley3,4,  Huijian Hu2,  Ping Ding1( )
The Key Laboratory of Conservation Biology for Endangered Wildlife of the Ministry of Education, College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Zijin'gang Campus, Hangzhou 310058, China
Guangdong Entomological Institute & South China Institute of Endangered Animals, Guangzhou 510260, China
Department of Biological Sciences, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA
Center for Tropical Plant Conservation, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Coral Gables, FL 33156, USA
Keywords:
, Bird guilds, Island area, Land-bridge islands, PAR, Thousand Island Lake, z values
Cite this article:
Ding Z, Feeley KJ, Hu H, et al. Bird guild loss and its determinants on subtropical land-bridge islands, China. Avian Research, 2015, 6(1): 10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40657-015-0019-9
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Abstract Full text About this article
Background

The guild concept is useful for understanding the community structure in a land-bridge island system, but most fragmentation studies have focused only on the importance of island area and isolation, other island attributes such as perimeter-area ratio (PAR) were overlooked or understudied.

Methods

We have adopted a guild approach to investigate the impacts of island attributes on bird guild richness on a set of 41 recently isolated land-bridge islands in the Thousand Island Lake (TIL), China.

Results

We found insectivores had the largest number of species (34 species), followed by understory foraging guilds (28 species), omnivores (27 species) and canopy guilds (25 species). Furthermore, our data showed that migrants and residents responded equally to island area, insectivores and understory guilds were sensitive to island area but omnivores and canopy guilds were not very sensitive. Most guild richness was determined by island area, except for omnivores and canopy guilds.

Conclusions

Although PAR or habitat diversity found to be important for bird species richness, our results highlight the importance of island area in maintaining bird diversity in fragmented island systems.


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About this article

Bird guild loss and its determinants on subtropical land-bridge islands, China

Show Author's information Zhifeng Ding1,2, Kenneth James Feeley3,4, Huijian Hu2, Ping Ding1( )
The Key Laboratory of Conservation Biology for Endangered Wildlife of the Ministry of Education, College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Zijin'gang Campus, Hangzhou 310058, China
Guangdong Entomological Institute & South China Institute of Endangered Animals, Guangzhou 510260, China
Department of Biological Sciences, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA
Center for Tropical Plant Conservation, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Coral Gables, FL 33156, USA

Abstract

Background

The guild concept is useful for understanding the community structure in a land-bridge island system, but most fragmentation studies have focused only on the importance of island area and isolation, other island attributes such as perimeter-area ratio (PAR) were overlooked or understudied.

Methods

We have adopted a guild approach to investigate the impacts of island attributes on bird guild richness on a set of 41 recently isolated land-bridge islands in the Thousand Island Lake (TIL), China.

Results

We found insectivores had the largest number of species (34 species), followed by understory foraging guilds (28 species), omnivores (27 species) and canopy guilds (25 species). Furthermore, our data showed that migrants and residents responded equally to island area, insectivores and understory guilds were sensitive to island area but omnivores and canopy guilds were not very sensitive. Most guild richness was determined by island area, except for omnivores and canopy guilds.

Conclusions

Although PAR or habitat diversity found to be important for bird species richness, our results highlight the importance of island area in maintaining bird diversity in fragmented island systems.

Keywords: , Bird guilds, Island area, Land-bridge islands, PAR, Thousand Island Lake, z values

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Publication history

Received: 28 July 2014
Accepted: 26 March 2015
Published: 15 June 2015
Issue date: January 2015

Copyright

© 2015 Ding et al.; licensee BioMed Central.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

We thank Prof. Mingjian Yu for helpful suggestions on field surveys of island habitat variables, Guang Hu and Xingfeng Si for constructive suggestions on data analyses and helpful suggestions on R programming. We also thank Lauren Barry for providing extensive comments on the draft manuscript. We are grateful to numerous graduates in our group for helping with species investigation, and to the Chun'an Forestry Bureau and the Thousand Island Lake National Forest Park for the permits necessary to conduct the research in the TIL. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their numerous helpful comments and suggestions. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31170397), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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