There doesn’t seem to be much surprising there.
Species richness and abundance increases up to a certain level of building
density and then declines. The full piece unlike the abstract might offer
some reasons but surely a main one is gardens and other artificial plantings in
moderately built-on areas. Here is the slide I use in my off-the-shelf
Canberra birds talk.
In the UK particularly the development would be on relatively
bird-poor agricultural land, not the sylvan wonderlands of the poets.
I notice one curious sentence: ‘ almost invariably
avian abundance declined at housing densities below which the UK govt requires
new developments to be built’. Given the rest of the abstract,
surely ‘below’ should be ‘above’. I assume that
the govt requirements are for a fairly high level of density and there are less
birds when it is even higher (?).
From: martin butterfield
[
Sent: Tuesday, 8 January 2008 8:58 AM
To: Canberra Birds
Subject: [canberrabirds] Housing density
In scouring the net I came across this abstract which might
be of interest to readers. This edition of the Journal doesn't appear to
be available on line but might be available through the National Library or
ANU.
