Birds in the Appalachian Mountains

Effects of climate change and landscape-scale forest management on avian communities, abundance, and nest success in the Appalachian Mountains

Map of the Appalachian Mountains study region (shaded).

We aim to address novel questions about how bird populations and assemblages in the Appalachian Mountains are shaped by changing environmental conditions due to global climate change and human disturbances. The Appalachian Mountains encompass an important biogeographical region with high global conservation value due to its myriad habitats and concomitant bird species diversity. Thus, there is a critical need to evaluate the synergistic effects of a changing climate and landscape on long-term trends in bird abundance and community composition in this region. Hannah's doctoral research is designed to fulfill that need and comprises five distinct but cohesive studies that investigate the factors underlying changes in Appalachian Mountain bird communities, as well as the relative merits of various forest management actions.

The first set of studies emphasizes the role of climate. First, we model the relative abundance of 15 songbird species throughout the Appalachian Mountains and disentangle the competing influences of climate versus land cover change. To better understand climate impacts at a finer scale, we examine 30 years of bird survey data from nearly 1,500 sites in the northern, central, and southern Appalachian Mountains. Specifically, we quantify changes in abundance of focal species, the number of cold- versus warm-adapted species, and community composition in relation to changing temperatures and precipitation amounts across the elevational and latitudinal gradients of the Appalachian Mountains. The results from these two studies advance our understanding of climate change effects and underscore the significance of the Appalachian Mountains to regional bird communities, with important implications for strategies mitigating large-scale threats to biodiversity.

Hannah's final three studies focus on the role of land management decisions. To fill a knowledge gap pertaining to how birds respond over time to landscape-level forest management, we use long-term data to investigate how bird communities, abundance, and productivity relate to landscape composition and configuration in forests with varying levels of timber harvest intensity. We then focus on a single focal species and use a similar long-term dataset to assess the effectiveness of recent habitat management guidelines for wood thrushes, which have experienced a ~60% cumulative population decline since 1970. For this study, we model wood thrush abundance and reproductive data to evaluate how their population dynamics respond to recommended landscape characteristics, habitat conditions, and forest management practices over time. Lastly, we use field data from the Monongahela National Forest that Hannah collected with species-specific and community-wide surveys, game cameras, and acoustic recording units. The purpose of this final investigation is to examine how game birds and songbirds respond to site- and landscape-level attributes of wildlife openings (i.e., open habitat patches created by land managers). The findings from these three studies will provide forest management recommendations that directly promote ecosystem health and function.

A wild turkey strolls past a game camera deployed in a wildlife opening within the Monongahela National Forest, WV. Wild turkeys were the most frequently detected game bird from the game camera data.

Amplitude (top two graphs) and spectrograms (bottom two graphs) of an American woodock vocal and aerial mating display from the left and right microphones of an autonomous recording unit deployed in a wildlife opening within the Monongahela National Forest, WV.

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