The importance of landscape attributes in biodiversity assessment. The Évora case study.

Quinta-Nova, L.C.; Batista, T.

The importance of landscape attributes in biodiversity assessment. The Évora case study.

2001

Quinta-Nova, L.C. | Batista, T.

The study of wildlife communities to assess the landscape value is crucial in Landscape Ecology in order to develop bidiversity management strategies in rural landscapes and to assist land managers with their decision making processes. This poster reports the results achieved assessing biodiversity using landscape structural indicators. The main objective was to identify the landscape measures having a greater influence on the presence of avian communities in agrosystems located around Évora (South of Portugal). Birds were sampled along transects representing the different land use patterns occurring within the study area. Land use types/vegetation cover were mapped within buffers around those transects. The landscape indicators applied to each buffer are Shannon & Weaver’s Diversity Index (H’) (1962) for habitats biodiversity, Modified Simpson’s Index (E) (Romme & Knigth, 1982) for habitats heterogeneity, and organization pattern (D1) (O’Neill et al. 1988). Avian diversity was also measured using the Simpson’s index. ArcView software was used to map the land cover features and to calculate the values for the selected indices. The relation between the avian communities present and its attributes with the different landscape measures was analysed with multivariate statistics tools.

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