Effects of landscape structure and forest reserve location on old-growth forest bird species in Northern Finland. Landscape Ecology 18

• Main Authors: Lluís Brotons, Mikko Mönkkönen, Esa Huhta, Ari Nikula, Ari Rajasärkkä
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Fennoscandia; Northern Finland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.532.3624; http://users.jyu.fi/~vemonkko/2003_Brotons_Monkkonen_et_al_Lands_Ecol.pdf

Old-growth forest birds in Fennoscandia have sharply declined in numbers during the last decades apparently due to commercial forest harvesting and fragmentation of old-growth forests. Conservation measures have led to the establishment of a forest reserve network to assure the persistence of forest birds at a regional scale. How-ever, little is known about the effects of landscape structure within and around the reserves on the distribution of old-growth forest birds. We used a hierarchical approach to address the questions of how landscape structure and composition within forest reserves, landscape composition of surrounding areas and reserve location affect the abundance of resident, old-growth forest birds in the Northern Finnish forest reserve network. The positive role of particular landscape features on bird distribution indicates that both the proportion of old-growth forests and the structure of boreal landscape mosaic has an important role in determining the distribution of these birds. The landscape composition surrounding the reserves proved to be only a weak predictor in species distribution mod-els, which argues against the primary role of the surrounding matrix in determining species distribution within forest reserves. Reserves located near the Russian border showed a higher abundance of old-growth birds than more western ones. Once east-west gradients in overall landscape composition had been accounted for, however, reserves did not differ significantly in the number of species present. These results suggest that landscape gra-