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Temporal patterns of breeding bird assemblages in small urban parks reveal relatively low stability and asynchrony

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Abstract

Parks serve as biodiversity centers in urban habitats and significantly affect the abundance and persistence of local bird populations. I examined bird assemblage stability, biodiversity, qualitative and quantitative composition, species turnover, changes in species ranking and composition, overall stability and synchrony in relation to park size in three small parks in the Town of Zvolen, Slovakia. Bird censuses were conducted by the combined version of the mapping method in 2014–2018. The mean species density and the total assemblage density were significantly different among parks and tended to decrease with increasing park size. The rarefied species richness and diversity measures within and between parks showed no or only very few significant differences in the five-year time series, but tended to be significantly higher in the larger parks at least in some years. The Sørensen (incidence) index-based clustering (UPGMA and cluster optimalization) almost perfectly divided year samples into three groups corresponding to the park sites, while the Horn (dominance) index only into two. None of the three species turnover metrics showed consistent patterns among parks, yet the highest mean total turnover was detected in the smallest park. Rate of assemblage changes showed decreasing trend with the increasing park size. The highest value of the assemblage stability metric was also found in the largest park. Bird assemblages showed relatively high degree of asynchrony in species abundances over time. These results indicate relatively low temporal stability, not strict boundaries and asynchrony of bird assemblages of these small parks.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Marek Svitok for providing software consultations in cluster analysis in the package R. I especially thank Richard T. Holmes for reviews and linguistic improvements of the earlier versions of this manuscript. This study was partly funded from the Slovak Grant Agency project VEGA No. 1/0532/21.

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This study was funded from my own sources and partly from the Slovak Grant Agency project VEGA No. 1/0532/21.

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  1. Department of Applied Zoology and Wildlife Management, Faculty of Forestry, Technical University in Zvolen, 960 01, Zvolen, Slovakia

    Martin Korňan

  2. Centre for Ecological Studies, Ústredie 14, 013 62, Veľké Rovné, Slovakia

    Martin Korňan

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Korňan, M. Temporal patterns of breeding bird assemblages in small urban parks reveal relatively low stability and asynchrony. COMMUNITY ECOLOGY 24, 99–111 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42974-023-00133-x

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