Avian community composition associated with interactions between local and landscape habitat attributes

As human demand for ecosystem products increases, managers of landscapes used for commodity production require information about effects of management regimes on biological diversity. Landscape attributes, however, may moderate ecological responses to local-scale conservation and management actions. As a result, uniform application of local management prescriptions may yield variable biodiversity responses. We examined how interactions between local habitat structure and landscape forest cover were associated with avian community composition in the Ouachita Mountains, Arkansas, USA, 1995-1998. We used Bayesian hierarchical models to estimate occupancy for 63 breeding bird species, while accounting for variable detection with data collected from 1941 temporally replicated point count stations. Specifically, we estimated how interactions of four local habitat covariates (canopy cover of mature coniferous and hardwood trees, number of snags, and shrub cover) with percentage of mature hardwood forest at the landscape scale were associated with species occupancy and richness. Average predictive comparisons indicated that snag count and shrub cover had the strongest associations with species richness. Estimated associations for each of the four local forest cover variables was similar across all levels of landscape forest cover, suggesting weak or negligible interactions between these local measures and the landscape covariate. We found little support for our main prediction that local/landscape habitat interactions would be strongest at low levels of landscape forest cover (1-20%). Consequently, we suggest that forest managers consider prescriptions that result in a broad spatial distribution of heterogeneous habitat structural conditions (e.g., variation in understory cover and composition), irrespective of landscape context, to maintain a diverse avian breeding assemblage on landscapes in this region. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.