Long-term avian community response to housing development at the boundary of U.S. protected areas: effect size increases with time

1. Biodiversity conservation is a primary function of protected areas. However, protected areas also attract people, and therefore, land use has intensified at the boundaries of these lands globally. In the USA, since the 1970s, housing growth at the boundaries (<1 km) of protected areas has increased at a rate far higher than on more distant private lands. Here, we designed our analyses to address our central hypothesis that increasing housing density in and near protected areas will increasingly alter their avian communities. 2. We quantified the relationship between abundance and richness of protected-area avian species of greatest conservation need, land-cover affiliates (e.g. species associated with natural land cover such as forest breeders) and synanthropes (e.g. species associated with humans) with housing density on the boundary of protected areas and on more distant private lands from 1970 to 2010 in three ecoregions of the USA. We accomplished this using linear mixed-model...

1. 生物多样性保护是保护区的核心功能之一。然而，保护区同时会吸引人类活动聚集，因此全球范围内各保护区周边区域的土地利用强度均显著提升。在美国，自20世纪70年代起，保护区边界（<1公里）范围内的住宅开发增速远高于更远区域的私有土地。本研究的核心假设为：保护区内部及周边的住宅密度持续攀升，将不断改变其鸟类群落结构。本次分析的设计初衷正是为验证这一核心假说。
2. 我们针对美国三个生态区，量化分析了1970年至2010年间，保护区边界及更远区域私有土地上的住宅密度，与三类鸟类种群的关联关系：一是具有最高保护优先级的保护区鸟类物种的丰度与物种丰富度，二是土地覆盖依赖型物种（例如依赖自然土地覆盖的森林繁殖鸟类），三是伴人物种（synanthropes，即与人类活动密切相关的物种）。本研究采用线性混合模型完成上述分析……