A niche-based framework to assess current monitoring of European forest birds and guide indicator species' selection

Wade, Amy S. I., Barov, Boris, Burfield, Ian J., Gregory, Richard D., Norris, Ken, Vorisek, Petr, Wu, Taoyang ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2663-2001 and Butler, Simon ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5111-5639 (2014) A niche-based framework to assess current monitoring of European forest birds and guide indicator species' selection. PLoS One, 9 (5). ISSN 1932-6203

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Abstract

Concern that European forest biodiversity is depleted and declining has provoked widespread efforts to improve management practices. To gauge the success of these actions, appropriate monitoring of forest ecosystems is paramount. Multi-species indicators are frequently used to assess the state of biodiversity and its response to implemented management, but generally applicable and objective methodologies for species' selection are lacking. Here we use a niche-based approach, underpinned by coarse quantification of species' resource use, to objectively select species for inclusion in a pan-European forest bird indicator. We identify both the minimum number of species required to deliver full resource coverage and the most sensitive species' combination, and explore the trade-off between two key characteristics, sensitivity and redundancy, associated with indicators comprising different numbers of species. We compare our indicator to an existing forest bird indicator selected on the basis of expert opinion and show it is more representative of the wider community. We also present alternative indicators for regional and forest type specific monitoring and show that species' choice can have a significant impact on the indicator and consequent projections about the state of the biodiversity it represents. Furthermore, by comparing indicator sets drawn from currently monitored species and the full forest bird community, we identify gaps in the coverage of the current monitoring scheme. We believe that adopting this niche-based framework for species' selection supports the objective development of multi-species indicators and that it has good potential to be extended to a range of habitats and taxa.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2014 Wade et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Computing Sciences Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Computational Biology > Phylogenetics (former - to 2018) Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Computational Biology Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Organisms and the Environment
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	09 Jun 2014 20:30
Last Modified:	07 Aug 2023 14:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/48559
DOI:	10.1371/journal.pone.0097217

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