SCIENCE BRIEF: A new modeling approach provides a birds-eye view of habitats, habitat fragmentation, and the effectiveness of conservation efforts
In a new publication selected as “editor’s choice” in the journal Landscape Ecology, researchers from Oregon State University’s Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society and Klamath Bird Observatory tested a novel species-centered technique for quantifying the influence of habitat amount and fragmentation on a community of 48 common bird species in Oregon’s Rogue Basin, including 25 oak-woodland specialists. Rather than using human-classified land-cover data, the species-centered technique uses stacked species-distribution models to quantify habitat amount and configuration. The results suggest that using this species-centered approach to define habitat for entire bird communities reveals relationships between fragmentation and bird diversity that would otherwise be obscured by the use of classified land-cover.