Geographic range dynamics of South Africa's bird species

Loftie-Eaton, Megan

Geographic range dynamics of South Africa's bird species

Master Thesis

2014

Abstract

A key issue in species conservation is a knowledge of the geographic ranges of species, and how these are changing through time. For birds there is a special opportunity to undertake studies of range changes, making use of the data collected by the First and Second Southern African Bird Atlas Projects (SABAP1 and SABAP2), which are separated in time by about two decades. In this thesis, I first describe the strengths and the weaknesses of the databases collected by these two citizen science projects, and therefore discuss the limitations placed on the analyses. We then undertake two sets of analyses, one focused on species, and one focused on areas. I show that, across all species, the Family to which the species belongs is an explanatory variable which explains approximately 45% of range expansion or contraction of a species. Diet and mass are also significant explanatory variables. For the analyses by areas, we demonstrate that the general encroachment of shrubs and trees in the savanna biome appears to have had a profound impact on the occurrence and abundance of a large suit of bird species, with the small insectivores and frugivores showing the largest increases.

Keywords

biological sciences

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