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Flagship bird species habitat management supports the presence of ground-nesting aculeate hymenopterans

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Abstract

Burrowing birds, such as sand martins (Riparia riparia), are tightly bound to resource patches narrowly defined by soil penetrability, clay content, low incidence of parasites, and sufficient amount of aerial prey. Such habitat patches are limited both in number and quality, and their management is expected to affect not only the target flagship species, but also the non-target species represented by solitary ground-nesting aculeate hymenopterans utilizing the same habitat patches. The efficiency of sand martin habitat restoration at 23 localities was evaluated. Since most of the successful efforts resulted in a decrease of soil penetration resistance, whether the observed penetration resistance decrease had an effect on non-target aculeate hymenopterans utilizing vertical or near-vertical slopes was studied. To assess this, penetration resistance and soil granulometric characteristics were measured at 39 randomly selected vertical slopes, and the density of ground-nesting aculeate hymenopterans was evaluated. Ground-nesting aculeate hymenopterans were found to avoid slopes containing only soil strata with high penetration resistance, or with high gravel content. The burrow density in slopes with regular (bi)annual management was similar to the burrow density in slopes with medium to low penetrability but with less frequent management efforts. Removal of the hard-packed crust resulted in the return of both sand martins and aculeate hymenopterans in the respective slopes. Flagship bird species habitat management was found to support not only the the target burrowing bird, but also the non-target ground-nesting aculeate hymenopteran species.

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Acknowledgments

I thank to Jiří Řehounek, Edvard Sequens, Olga Dvořáková, Václav Kovář, Karel Šimeček, and Petr Berka for sharing data regarding sand martin protection efforts at some of the referenced localities. This study was supported in part by the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic. I thank Editor and the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on the first version of this manuscript.

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  1. Third Faculty of Medicine, Charles University in Prague, Ruská 87, CZ-100 00, Prague 10, Czech Republic

    Petr Heneberg

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Correspondence to Petr Heneberg.

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Heneberg, P. Flagship bird species habitat management supports the presence of ground-nesting aculeate hymenopterans. J Insect Conserv 16, 899–908 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-012-9477-0

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