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Using Vegetation Guilds to Predict Bird Habitat Characteristics in Riparian Areas

  • Physical and Biotic Drivers of Change in Riparian Ecosystems
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Abstract

Within arid regions riparian forests support high bird diversity compared to surrounding uplands. In these same regions, water demands for agriculture, urbanization, and recreation have altered the structure and composition of riparian forests and degraded bird habitat. Along rivers, plants with similar responses to flood disturbance and water availability can be grouped into functional guilds using traits. The use of plant guilds can mechanistically link bird distributions to traits such as canopy height, specific leaf area, and growth form. We demonstrate that bird species richness, abundance, and diversity are related to the heterogeneity of vegetation structure and plant guilds along a perennial river in the southwestern U.S. High-quality habitat can be explained by canopy cover, foliage height diversity, and foliage cover in the understory. The tall tree guild (dominated by Salix gooddingii) was the strongest predictor of bird habitat followed by drought tolerant shrubs (dominated by Prosopis velutina) demonstrating that riparian shrublands should be considered for conservation alongside gallery forests. Projected changes in flow regimes may result in homogenization of riparian vegetation and reduce habitat quality for migratory and breeding land birds. Practitioners can use developed methods to group vegetation by guilds to focus bird conservation efforts in arid ecosystems.

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Acknowledgements

This work was been funded by the U.S. Forest Service. We thank Chris Holmquist-Johnson, Eric Wahlig, Jeanmarie Haney, Sidney Riddle, and Kristan Godbeer who helped on this project. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship and Graduate Degree Program in Ecology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Erin S. Cubley & David J. Cooper

  2. College of Integrative Sciences and Arts, Arizona State University, Mesa, AZ, USA

    Heather L. Bateman

  3. Watershed, Fish, Wildlife, Air and Rare Plants Staff, National Stream and Aquatic Ecology Center, U.S. Forest Service, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    David M. Merritt

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  1. Erin S. Cubley
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Appendix

Appendix

Table 3 List of bird species and abundance present at study reaches. Habitat index shows the range (minimum and maximum) or single value where (plot) the species was detected
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Fig. 9
figure 9

Variation in species trait composition for woody (top) and herbaceous and graminoid species (bottom). Species have been grouped based on the results of the cluster analysis with differences in composition supported with post-hoc PERMANOVA. In herbaceous grouping, E (drought tolerant herbs) and F (large seeded herbs) were not statistically different, but we chose to keep them as separate guilds based on the results of the cluster analysis. All other flow response guilds had distinct trait compositions. Due to the similarity of some species, not all are displayed on the ordination to avoid text overlap

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Fig. 10
figure 10

Relationship between herbaceous/graminoid flow response guilds on the Verde River, AZ. Guild A consists of disturbance and inundation tolerant herbs and grasses (e.g. Schoenoplectus americanus, Apocynum canabium). Guild B consists of disturbance intolerant inundation tolerant sedges and reeds (e.g. Phragmites australis, Typha dominigensis). Guild C consists inundation and disturbance intolerant herbs and grasses (e.g. Bromus diandrus, Ambrosia psilostachya)

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Cubley, E.S., Bateman, H.L., Merritt, D.M. et al. Using Vegetation Guilds to Predict Bird Habitat Characteristics in Riparian Areas. Wetlands 40, 1843–1862 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-020-01372-8

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