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Ecol. Forestry & Conservation
– The influence of clearcut harvesting on bird communities in an adjacent protected area in Nova Scotia: Implications for buffer implementation
John Brazner et al., 2024. In Forest Ecology and Management Volume 559, 1 May 2024. Highlights
• Human activities adjacent to protected areas (PAs) have been intensifying.
• We quantified the influence of clearcut harvesting on bird communities in PAs.
•There were clear differences in the bird communities among transect locations.
• The influence of clearcut harvesting was greater than 100 m for many species.
– Wealth of fauna call N.S. forests home
Article by Bob Bancroft in Naturally NS, 2014. Subtitle: But harvesting methods can pose risks to the province’s many birds and animals. “Nova Scotia’s tall, natural forests, with their shady, damp forest floors, serve as hosts for many seasonal and resident wildlife species…”
– Cavity Trees, Dens & Snags
Ch. 6.1 in Good Forestry in the Granite State [New Hampshire], 2010.
Table 1 lists Minimum Tree Diameters for Cavity-using Species, most shared with the Wabanaki Forest. Recommended practices for maintaining cavity and den trees in managed forests.
Conserving Bird Species at Risk in NS Working Forests- Dr. Cindy Staicer
This webinar was recorded on June 2nd, 2022 as part of a workshop series on Conserving Bird Species at Risk in NS Working Forests led by bird researcher and retired Dalhousie University professor, Dr. Cindy Staicer. Subtitle: SAR Conservation through Best management Practices. Goal (at 7:51) . Four of the five landbird Species at Risk (SAR) in Nova Scotia are Aerial Insectivores – Common Nighthawk, Eastern Wood-Pee-Wee, Olive-sided flycatcher, Canada Warbler; the Rusty Blackbird picks insects out of shallow water. She also talks about Canada Migratory Birds Convention Act which provides legal protection of native birds, migratory or not, their nests, eggs and nestlings from destruction, purposeful or accidental.
Forest degradation drives widespread avian habitat and population declines
by Matthew G. Betts et all, 2022 in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The full text is publicly available. Abstract In many regions of the world, forest management has reduced old forest and simplified forest structure and composition. We hypothesized that such forest degradation has resulted in long-term habitat loss for forest-associated bird species of eastern Canada (130,017 km2) which, in turn, has caused bird-population declines. Despite little change in overall forest cover, we found substantial reductions in old forest as a result of frequent clear-cutting and a broad-scale transformation to intensified forestry. Back-cast species distribution models revealed that breeding habitat loss occurred for 66% of the 54 most common species from 1985 to 2020 and was strongly associated with reduction in old age classes. Using a long-term, independent data-set, we found that habitat amount predicted population size for 94% of species, and habitat loss was associated with popula- tion declines for old-forest species. Forest degradation may therefore be a primary cause of biodiversity decline in managed forest landscapes.
Also view:
– 2022 Bird Study: Notes
– 2022 Bird Study: Press Reports