scholarly journals Developing fine‐grained nationwide predictions of valuable forests using biodiversity indicator bird species

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raimo Virkkala ◽  
Niko Leikola ◽  
Heini Kujala ◽  
Sonja Kivinen ◽  
Pekka Hurskainen ◽  
...  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Mao ◽  
Jun Kang Chow ◽  
Pin Siang Tan ◽  
Kuan-fu Liu ◽  
Jimmy Wu ◽  
...  

AbstractAutomatic bird detection in ornithological analyses is limited by the accuracy of existing models, due to the lack of training data and the difficulties in extracting the fine-grained features required to distinguish bird species. Here we apply the domain randomization strategy to enhance the accuracy of the deep learning models in bird detection. Trained with virtual birds of sufficient variations in different environments, the model tends to focus on the fine-grained features of birds and achieves higher accuracies. Based on the 100 terabytes of 2-month continuous monitoring data of egrets, our results cover the findings using conventional manual observations, e.g., vertical stratification of egrets according to body size, and also open up opportunities of long-term bird surveys requiring intensive monitoring that is impractical using conventional methods, e.g., the weather influences on egrets, and the relationship of the migration schedules between the great egrets and little egrets.


2016 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 627-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Valerio ◽  
Marco Basile ◽  
Rosario Balestrieri ◽  
Mario Posillico ◽  
Sergio Di Donato ◽  
...  

2014 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliano Fanelli ◽  
Corrado Battisti

Hemeroby is a concept widely employed in assessment of the effect of human activities on vegetation. In this study, we apply the concept to a set of bird species occurring in a Mediterranean remnant wetland. The aim was to obtain an average hemeroby index for two seasonally related bird assemblages (i.e. breeding and wintering) based on the information related to two levels of plant hemeroby. In a grid of 47 cells 100×100 m-wide, we sampled the fine-grained distribution of plant communities (Braun-Blanquet method/cell) in parallel with birds (point count method; one point count/cell), assigning an independent score of hemeroby to plants and birds on a scale from I to V, from pristine habitats with a lack of natural and/or anthropogenic disturbance (score = I) to completely artificial habitats (score = V). Whereas bird species ranged from categories II to V, vegetation types spanned only the categories III and IV. Therefore, bird species showed a higher variability in hemeroby. By comparing hemeroby scores, we can deduce the effect that the vegetation disturbance may have on bird species. The mean hemeroby for breeding birds, calculated on all the species occurring in a determined plant hemeroby category, is not significantly different between sites with higher (= IV) and lower (= III) plant hemeroby (i.e. higher and lower level of disturbance). The mean hemeroby of the wintering birds was significantly different in the two levels of plant hemeroby (i.e. higher vs. lower hemeroby). Our data suggest that only the wintering birds had a hemeroby distribution pattern related to that of the plants, while the distribution of breeding birds showed no association, i.e. they appear in similar distribution in both plant hemeroby classes. This pattern may reflect the characteristics of the habitat types in relation to bird seasonality: a large section of wintering bird species are strictly water-related, linked to habitats with low plant hemeroby, so appearing more sensitive to change in plant hemeroby when compared to breeding species. Although explorative, our data may be useful in wildlife management, implying that in wetland–grassland mosaics the more sensitive wintering bird species are suitable as indicators aimed to test the effect of natural and anthropogenic disturbances.


Author(s):  
I. P. Quijano ◽  
M. J. L. Flores ◽  
A. B. Malaki

Abstract. In biodiversity conservation, ecological corridors are assumed to increase landscape-level connectivity and to enhance the viability of otherwise isolated wildlife populations. Mapping these corridors serves as a feasible method to support forest management efforts in pinpointing areas to give special attention to. Here, we assess the current forest presence in the 3,000 hectare Mt. Lantoy, Key Biodiversity Area in Argao, Cebu and present potential forest corridors that could enhance the canopy cover of the current protected area. We present a method to map the potential corridors through the identification of the forest patches obtained from the global forest cover dataset and the creation of a species distribution model for the black shama, an endemic bird species in Cebu island and a great biodiversity indicator for the area. Our ecological corridors were acquired through the sum of the cost distance rasters obtained from the weighted overlay and cost surface tools of the black shama habitat suitability model. With the obtained corridors from the study, four potential forest corridors/ extensions were identified connecting five different forest patches. These corridors have areas that range from 0.47–2.17 square kilometers, with a potential to increase the forest cover in the KBA to more than 33% after corridor modelling.


2021 ◽  
pp. 183-187
Author(s):  
Corrado Battisti ◽  
Giuliano Fanelli

We reported the first available data on the fine-grained structure of the short-toed treecreeper’s (Certhia brachydactyla Brehm, 1820) nest located in an urban park of Rome (central Italy). The outer structure was characterized by a high percentage of conifer (Pinus pinea) needles, which are significantly longer than other branches and twigs. Pine needles are widely available in urban parks, and being more flexible and easily detachable, may contribute to the support of the outer nest structure provided by other linear components (i.e., twigs/branches). Moreover, their aromatic terpenes may control nest parasites. In contrast, the internal cup lining was composed of a very light and heterogeneous set of components (bird feathers of at least one synanthropic bird species: Streptopelia decaocto), vegetable fluff, grass leaves, shrubs and trees, moss, sand, dust, and plant roots, i.e., all the materials largely used in bird nests because of their insulative qualities and thermoregulation functions. Although the internal cup lining was more heterogeneous in composition, the total weight of the outer nest was significantly heavier (>65% on the total nest weight).


Author(s):  
ZongYuan Ge ◽  
Chris McCool ◽  
Conrad Sanderson ◽  
Alex Bewley ◽  
Zetao Chen ◽  
...  

2004 ◽  
Vol 118 (2) ◽  
pp. 229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Jones ◽  
William J. McLeish ◽  
Raleigh J. Robertson

Single-species habitat management strategies are often undertaken without explicit consideration of their effects on the larger community. Here we explore the potential effects of managing eastern Ontario deciduous forests for the Cerulean Warbler (Dendroica cerulea) by examining its potential as a biodiversity indicator species and as an umbrella species. Our results indicate that the Cerulean Warbler would not be an effective biodiversity indicator, as its distribution across the studied landscape did not coincide with areas of high avian species richness. However, the Cerulean Warbler may be effective as an umbrella species for the maintenance of populations of other canopy-nesting species that require mature deciduous forest habitats. It is hoped that the conclusions reached in Ontario, while perhaps not directly transferable to all parts of the breeding range, encourage other Cerulean Warbler researchers to ask similar questions in their study areas.


2018 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 704-714 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiu-Shen Wei ◽  
Chen-Wei Xie ◽  
Jianxin Wu ◽  
Chunhua Shen
Keyword(s):  

Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 1838
Author(s):  
Chih-Wei Lin ◽  
Mengxiang Lin ◽  
Jinfu Liu

Classifying fine-grained categories (e.g., bird species, car, and aircraft types) is a crucial problem in image understanding and is difficult due to intra-class and inter-class variance. Most of the existing fine-grained approaches individually utilize various parts and local information of objects to improve the classification accuracy but neglect the mechanism of the feature fusion between the object (global) and object’s parts (local) to reinforce fine-grained features. In this paper, we present a novel framework, namely object–part registration–fusion Net (OR-Net), which considers the mechanism of registration and fusion between an object (global) and its parts’ (local) features for fine-grained classification. Our model learns the fine-grained features from the object of global and local regions and fuses these features with the registration mechanism to reinforce each region’s characteristics in the feature maps. Precisely, OR-Net consists of: (1) a multi-stream feature extraction net, which generates features with global and various local regions of objects; (2) a registration–fusion feature module calculates the dimension and location relationships between global (object) regions and local (parts) regions to generate the registration information and fuses the local features into the global features with registration information to generate the fine-grained feature. Experiments execute symmetric GPU devices with symmetric mini-batch to verify that OR-Net surpasses the state-of-the-art approaches on CUB-200-2011 (Birds), Stanford-Cars, and Stanford-Aircraft datasets.


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