Davenport et al. Initial responses of songbird communities to forest reclamation on legacy surface mines

This repository includes data, code for the model, and code to make basic plots for the hierarchical community occupancy model of [Davenport, R.N, C. Barton, J. Cox, J.C. Guzy, L. Sherman, J.L. Larkin and S.J. Price 2025. Initial responses of songbird communities to forest reclamation on legacy surface mines. <i>Ecosphere</i>, <i>in press</i>In June 2022, we conducted repeated point count surveys in high-elevation, red spruce-northern hardwood forests in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern West Virginia, USA . We used a multi-species, hierarchical Bayesian model developed by Zipkin et al. (2009) to estimate species-specific occupancy responses to recently restored (i.e., reforested) surface mines (2-5 yr and 8-11 yr post restoration), naturally regenerating forests on surface mines and unmined mature forests.Data include point count survey data files as a .csv that includes presence-absence data for each species at 32 sites during 3 surveys. The point count survey data also include site covariates: day of year (DOY), time of day (Time), estimated cloud cover (Cloud), estimated wind speed (Wind), and air temperature (Temp ). We also include site covariate file that include site number and treatment type as YFRA (young, forestry reclamation approach), OFRA (older FRA), REGEN (naturally regenerating forests on surface mines and MAT (mature, unmined forests). We provide text files for each multi-species occupancy model, as a single model was developed for each avian guild (i.e., generalist species, mature forest species, and young forest species). Data are brought into Program R, and the model is run using the package R2Winbugs. Each model file includes the annotated model as well as code to generate some basic plots.