Urban parks can maintain minimal resilience for Neotropical bird communities

Autor(es)

Estevo, Cesar A. ^{[1, 2]} ; Nagy-Reis, Mariana Baldy ^[1] ; Silva, Wesley Rodrigues ^[1]

Afiliação do(s) autor(es)

^[1] Univ Estadual Campinas, Dept Anim Biol, Campinas, SP - Brazil

^[2] Av Juscelino Kubitschek 901, BR-13141130 Paulinia, SP - Brazil

• Tipo de documento: Artigo Científico
• Fonte: URBAN FORESTRY & URBAN GREENING; v. 27, p. 84-89, OCT 2017.
• Citações Web of Science: 4

Resumo

Birds may use urban parks as shelter and refuge, contributing with numerous ecosystem services upon which humans and other organisms depend on. To safeguard these services, it is important that bird communities of urban environments hold some degree of resilience, which refers to the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances and changes, while maintaining its functions and structures. Here we assessed the resilience of the bird community inhabiting an urban park in the Southeast region of Brazil. We classified birds in feeding guilds and identified discontinuities and aggregations of body masses (i.e., scales) using hierarchical cluster analysis. We then calculated five resilience indices for our urban park and for a preserved continuous forest (reference area): the average richness of functions, diversity of functions, evenness of functions, and redundancy of functions within-and cross-scale. The urban park had less species, lower feeding guild richness, and lower within-scale redundancy than the reference area. However, they had similar proportion of species in each function, diversity of functions, evenness of functions, and cross-scale redundancy. The lower species richness and, consequently, the lack of some species performing some ecological functions may be responsible for the overall lower resilience in the urban park. Our results suggest that the bird community of the urban park is in part resilient, as it maintained many biological functions, indicating some environmental quality despite the high anthropogenic impacts of this area. We believe that urban forest remnants with more complex and diverse vegetation are possibly more likely to maintain higher resilience in the landscape than open field parks or parks with suppressed or altered vegetation. We propose that raising resilience in the urban park would possibly involve increasing vegetation complexity and heterogeneity, which could increase biodiversity in a large scale. (AU)

• Processo FAPESP: 14/00179-3 - Análise da resiliência ecológica da avifauna em um fragmento reflorestado na cidade de Mauá-SP
• Beneficiário: César Augusto Estevo
• Modalidade de apoio: Bolsas no Brasil - Iniciação Científica