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Portrait of Henrik Smith. Photo.

Henrik Smith

Professor

Portrait of Henrik Smith. Photo.

Community occupancy before-after-control-impact (CO-BACI) analysis of Hurricane Gudrun on Swedish forest birds

Author

  • James C. Russell
  • Martin Stjernman
  • Åke Lindström
  • Henrik Smith

Summary, in English

Resilience of ecological communities to perturbation is important in the face of increased global change from anthropogenic stressors. Monitoring is required to detect the impact of, and recovery from, perturbations, and before-after-control-impact (BACI) analysis provides a powerful framework in this regard. However, species in a community are not observed with perfect detection, and occupancy analysis is required to correct for imperfect detectability of species. We present a Bayesian community occupancy before-after-control-impact (CO-BACI) framework to monitor ecological community response to perturbation when constituent species are imperfectly detected. We test the power of the model to detect changes in community composition following an acute perturbation with simulation. We then apply the model to a study of the impact of a large hurricane on the forest bird community of Sweden, using data from the national bird survey scheme. Although simulation shows the model can detect changes in community occupancy following an acute perturbation, application to a Swedish forest bird community following a major hurricane detected no change in community occupancy despite widespread forest loss. Birds with landscape occupancy less than 50% required correcting for detectability. We conclude that CO-BACI analysis is a useful tool that can incorporate rare species in analyses and detect occupancy changes in ecological communities following perturbation, but, because it does not include abundance, some impacts may be overlooked.

Department/s

  • Biodiversity
  • Centre for Environmental and Climate Science (CEC)
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate
  • Biodiversity and Conservation Science

Publishing year

2015

Language

English

Pages

685-694

Publication/Series

Ecological Applications

Volume

25

Issue

3

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Ecological Society of America

Topic

  • Earth and Related Environmental Sciences
  • Ecology

Keywords

  • Bayesian framework
  • before-after-control-impact study
  • community
  • stability
  • forest birds
  • Hurricane Erwin
  • Hurricane Gudrun
  • perturbation
  • resilience
  • Swedish bird survey

Status

Published

Research group

  • Biodiversity and Conservation Science

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1051-0761