Abstract:
Urbanization is one of the main causes of the rapid loss of biodiversity. To examine the impact of habitat fragmentation stemming from urbanization on bird diversity and distribution patterns. We used the line-transect method to survey the diversity of birds in 12 urban parks in Liuzhou city from April to August 2021. We recorded 79 bird species in total, which belonged to 11 orders and 37 families. Among the identified species, 1 species qas listed as national class A protected species, and 9 species were listed as national class B protected species. Among these, passerine bird were the highest species richness, with 52 species, accounting for 65.82% of the total number of bird species. Linear regression analysis showed that bird species richness was significantly positively correlated with the park area, but no significant correlation with the distance to the nearest larger park. Beta diversity revealed that bird species composition was dominated by species turnover component, indicating that bird species component was a variety between the parks. The analysis of nestedness, based on the metric NODF and WNODF, revealed that the observed NODF and WNODF for sites of birds were significantly lower than expected from the null model, indicating that bird assemblages were anti-nested among the parks. The anti-nested structure of bird communities may be the result of larger differences in species composition between parks being driven by environmental filtering, priority effects, or park characteristic, but further research is needed to determine the likely causal mechanism of anti-nestedness. Our results can provide the bird conservation policies for Liuzhou city and other Karst cities. From the species perspective, we recommend that the conservation of birds in urban should be given to parks with larger areas and effective conservation of forest parks and wetland parks should be focused.