Hello everyone: I would like to know about how to evaluate the ornithological value (or importance) of a series of wetlands; or the conservation value of a series of wetlands for birds. Imagine you have the list of bird species inhabiting two wetlands, A and B. And you also have the abundance values of each species at each wetland. If you restrict your study to birds, how can you assess the conservation value of wetland A vs. wetland B?
I guess something like an Index of Biological Integrity (IBI) could work...
Any help from you will be welcome. Thanks in advance:
Jose.
Yes, IBI reflects the ecological complexity from statistical analysis and is based on observed taxa. IBI can equal total number of species, ratios of particular taxa, percent omnivores or carnivores, number of individuals, etc. There is no set way of calculating IBI, but it is a good analysis for comparison of sites.
You can also look at other conservation values such as species distribution, population size and trends, presence of rare or endemic species, and critical threats, such as habitat fragmentation :)
Hi Jose,
You might look at:
Bryce SA, Hughes RM, Kaufmann PR. 2002. Development of a bird integrity index: using bird assemblages as indicators of riparian condition. Environmental Management 30(2):294-310.
There are other bird IBIs in the literature as well.
Dear Jose, I am sure you have a great data set. However, please find a way to measure/or factor in attributes such as survey completeness, observability of species, survey effort biases etc. For example if Wetland B is much larger than A, C,D,E, F. etc than usually this wetlnad recieves much more interest. It overshadows the others, even nearby ones (a survey overshadow effect for smaller wetlnads nearby). This sort of stuff really confounds bird data from wetlands. Good luck.
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