Dynamic multi-species occupancy models of birds of high-altitude grasslands in eastern South Africa
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Ecology, Environmental Sciences, Statistics
- Keywords
- hierarchical occupancy models, habitat suitability, Grazing and fire, grass height and cover, monitoring, occupancy, habitat management
- Copyright
- © 2018 Maphisa et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Dynamic multi-species occupancy models of birds of high-altitude grasslands in eastern South Africa. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26932v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26932v1
Abstract
Moist, high-altitude grasslands of eastern South African harbour rich avian diversity and endemism. This area is also threatened by increasingly intensive agriculture and land conversion for energy production. This conflict is particularly evident at Ingula, an Important Bird and Biodiversity Area located within the least conserved high-altitude grasslands and which is also the site of a new Pumped Storage Scheme. The new management seeks to maximise biodiversity through manipulation of the key habitat variables: grass height and grass cover through burning and grazing to make habitat suitable for birds. However, different species have individual habitat preferences, which further vary through the season. We used a dynamic multi-species occupancy model to examine the seasonal occupancy dynamics of 12 common grassland bird species and their habitat preferences. We estimated monthly occupancy, colonisation and persistence in relation to grass height and grass cover throughout the summer breeding season of 2011/12. For majority of these species, at the beginning of the season occupancy increased with increasing grass height and decreased with increasing grass cover. Persistence and colonisation decreased with increasing grass height and cover. However, the 12 species varied considerably in their responses to grass height and cover. Our results suggest that management should aim to provide plots which vary in grass height and cover to maximise bird diversity. We also conclude that the decreasing occupancy with increasing grass cover and low colonisation with increasing grass height and cover is a results of little grazing on our study site. We further conclude some of the 12 selected species are good indicators of habitat suitability more generally because they represent a range of habitat needs and are relatively easy to monitor.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.