Protected areas provide critical additional support to breeding birds: a case study from Nova Scotia, Canada
Protected areas are a key component of most conservation strategies because they are thought to enhance biodiversity value relative to similar habitats in working landscapes.
Although monitoring changes in biodiversity associated with protected areas is critical to assessing conservation success, it has only been done in a limited way across much of Canada.
We set out to examine whether protected areas in Nova Scotia are functioning to enhance the biodiversity value of the landscapes in which they are embedded by surveying breeding bird communities in forested wetlands (shrub swamps, treed swamps and wood peatlands) inside and outside of Cloud Lake Wilderness Area, a large protected area in western Nova Scotia.
Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.
We found rich bird communities and many species of conservation concern at both inside and outside sites, indicating that both types of sites are playing important conservation roles.
While bird communities at different types of outside sites were dominated by disturbance-tolerant species such as crows, jays and robins, inside sites were more dominated by birds that migrate long distances and insect-eating species.
Our results suggest protected areas are providing critical additional support to key groups of birds that are in currently in steep decline in many regions of the world.
Read the paper — Forested wetlands in a protected area and the adjacent working landscape provide complementary biodiversity value based on breeding birds: A case study from Nova Scotia, Canada by John Brazner, Jake Walker, Frances Mackinnon, and Rob Cameron.
