Threshold Responses of Bird Communities to Human Footprint: Testing the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis and Implications for Biodiversity Conservation
Xi Yang, Lishi Zhang, Piotr Tryjanowski, Frédéric Jiguet, Zheng Han, Haitao Wang · 2025
Read Threshold Responses of Bird Communities to Human Footprint: Testing the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis and Implications for Biodiversity Conservation by Xi Yang, Lishi Zhang, Piotr Tryjanowski, Frédéric Jiguet, Zheng Han, Haitao Wang (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12706524.txt.
Description
Yang and five co-authors mapped how bird communities respond to human pressure in northeastern Inner Mongolia in twenty twenty-five. The Human Footprint Index sums human impacts such as roads, farming, and settlement. Birds, sensitive to change, serve as indicators of ecosystem health.
The team tested the idea that diversity peaks at middle disturbance levels. Using threshold analysis, they found the bird community shifted sharply at a footprint score near fourteen. Individual species had thresholds spread widely. Richness and diversity did peak at middle pressure, near a score of twenty-three point five, then fell. The results support the middle-disturbance idea while showing composition changes earlier. The authors advise conservation plans that track both diversity and which species remain.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Xi Yang, Lishi Zhang, Piotr Tryjanowski, Frédéric Jiguet, Zheng Han, Haitao Wang |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 35 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |