With strategic conservation, the purple finch can continue singing the praises of New Hampshire for many years to come. “Each songbird has a slightly different habitat preference, so wildlife managers can use this model to create customized conservation plans based on their species of choice.”įor the purple finch, which has seen a 52% cumulative decline during the last 50 years of the Breeding Bird Survey, this DEVELOP project provides some guidance – and hope. “Having received our results and end products, our project partners are now better equipped to react to the effects of forest fragmentation and changing songbird populations,” Weber said. When the project concluded in 2014, the team handed its data over to the National Audubon Society, which incorporated the model output into its strategies for land conservation and management.
With this discovery, she added, “we now know how fragmentation affects the likelihood of a bird occupying, colonizing, and abandoning a habitat.” And birds living in grasslands, as expected, left areas with increasing forest cover.” “However, forest-dwelling species left habitats with increasing edge.
#The songbird society Patch#
Edge-dwelling songbirds appear to have left habitats as increased and patch area decreased,” explained DEVELOP team member Kiersten Newtoff. “We found that songbirds with different life histories have different responses to forest fragmentation. The survey provides long-term, large-scale population data for breeding bird species, and it has observed declining trends in songbirds. Geological Survey ( USGS) and Canadian Wildlife Service. Next, the DEVELOP team needed to know the location of New England’s songbirds, so it used the North American Breeding Bird Survey, a partnership between the U.S. Image of reforestation and deforestation areas around Berlin, N.H. With this information, the team identified highly fragmented forests and the health and density of the forest cover. The project team reviewed satellite and sensor data to view forest fragmentation, landscape features, and vegetation across New England. “More houses and highways … mean less forest and more fragmentation.” More fragmentation also leads to more “edge” environments – pronounced boundaries between different habitats. “While habitat occurs gradually in nature, habitat destruction by humans is increasing fragmentation to an alarming degree,” said Sam Weber, DEVELOP team member. Forest fragmentation occurs when a tree-filled habitat gets cut down into smaller, more solitary patches, often with open lands or human development running between them. The Audubon Society lists forest fragmentation and habitat loss – due to stressors such as commercial development and climate change – as a leading threat to forest birds in the Northeast. One issue for New Hampshire’s songbirds is the increasingly patchy nature of their habitat. “ we now know how fragmentation affects the likelihood of a bird occupying, colonizing, and abandoning a habitat.” NASA Earth Applied Sciences’s DEVELOP program spearheads research partnerships seeking solutions to environmental and other Earth science issues. In a joint project with the National Audubon Society, NASA DEVELOP brought Earth observations into the equation to help map and model the changing suitability of New England’s landscape. Changes in passerine abundance and distribution are often indicative of underlying changes in their environment, such as habitat loss, climate change, and an increase of predatory species. Recent research and field studies have shown a marked trend towards decreasing populations of passerine birds – also known as perching birds or songbirds. Credit: NASA Earth ObservatoryĬonservationists are increasingly concerned, however, about the abundance and diversity of New England songbirds. Taken in fall, this image clearly shows the changes in tree-type with height as you ascend the Northern Presidentials, from deciduous to evergreen to alpine zones.
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