Spatial Pattern of Breeding Bird Species Richness and Assemblage Composition in Northern Taiwan
Date Issued
2006
Date
2006
Author(s)
Koh, Chao-Nien
DOI
en-US
Abstract
The studies described in this thesis were intended to understand the composition of breeding bird assemblages and the breeding bird species richness (BSR) in northern Taiwan in the light of existing ecological hypotheses. Among 141 sampling sites that were conducted, both the environment and space played important roles in the composition of bird assemblages, though environmental variables appear to have the greater effect at this scale of analysis. Of the environmental variables examined, climate (i.e. temperature and precipitation) predominated on the environment-bird relationship.
Investigation of the breeding BSR along the elevational gradient examined in northern Taiwan against the mid-domain model showed that this model could not fully support the breeding BSR, in part due to some observed deviation from the predictions of this model. Moreover, the nonrandomness of the distributions of endpoints or midpoints implied that asymmetrical hump-shaped curve of the species richness might come from the combination of the favorableness hypothesis, the productivity hypothesis, and the mid-domain effect.
Primary productivity and human activity were implicated in the BSR. Further attempts to identifying and validating potential applicability of these ecological hypotheses to the observed BSR pattern in this region have revealed that each hypothesis per se could not stand alone to account for the pattern. Rather, a combination of them would be a better fit to the empirical data. The discrepancies between our study and other previous studies might arise from a higher level of human disturbance in Taiwan than that in other studies.
Other implications from these studies have suggested that multiple abiotic factors also play an important role in the bird assemblage composition and BSR in Northern Taiwan. While productivity has long been considered the primary process of BSR, among the variables studied, climate was also shown to be the most important driver of bird assemblage composition. Following a variety of qualitative methodology that has applied to most ecological studies, this thesis has explored and demonstrated the potential for quantifying regional ecological patterns through multivariate and geographical analyses of multiple species with the assistance of GIS data in Taiwan.
Subjects
鳥種豐富度
海拔梯度
中間區域效應
常態化差異植生指數
生產力
氣候
棲地異質度
人類活動
空間相關性
bird species richness
elevational gradient
mid-domain effect
NDVI
productivity
climate
habitat heterogeneity
human activity
spatial autocorrelation
Taiwan
Type
other