Monitoring Hawaiian Biodiversity: Pilot study to assess changes to Hawaii Island forest birds and their habitat - 2015 vegetation structure dataset
Dates
Publication Date
2018-11-27
Start Date
2015-06-08
End Date
2015-08-26
Citation
Camp, R.J., Gorresen, P.M., Brinck, K.W., and Jacobi, J.D., 2018, Hawaii Island biodiversity trends across time and space, 1977 and 2015: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9GTONFB.
Summary
The Hawaii Forest Bird Survey (HFBS) systematically characterized plant and bird communities across transects spanning all major Hawaiian Islands except O‘ahu. This extensive dataset has now been organized into a database and associated geographic information system (GIS) layers. This baseline provides an opportunity to assess how forest ecosystems and their constituent bird and plant populations have changed over time. As part of the HaBiTATS (Hawaiian Biodiversity Trends Across Time and Space) project, a select area on Hawai‘i Island was surveyed in 2015 with the objective of demonstrating the potential of using the HFBS methodology to reassess the status of bird and plant communities across multiple geographic regions and islands. [...]
Summary
The Hawaii Forest Bird Survey (HFBS) systematically characterized plant and bird communities across transects spanning all major Hawaiian Islands except O‘ahu. This extensive dataset has now been organized into a database and associated geographic information system (GIS) layers. This baseline provides an opportunity to assess how forest ecosystems and their constituent bird and plant populations have changed over time. As part of the HaBiTATS (Hawaiian Biodiversity Trends Across Time and Space) project, a select area on Hawai‘i Island was surveyed in 2015 with the objective of demonstrating the potential of using the HFBS methodology to reassess the status of bird and plant communities across multiple geographic regions and islands. The results of the comparative study presented herein highlight examples of the apparent vulnerability and resiliency of native-dominated Hawaiian ecosystems. Specific study objectives were to: (1) collect information on plant and bird species community composition, abundance, and spatial distribution following the original HFBS methodology; (2) assess changes in several biodiversity metrics; (3) examine changes in the distribution of invasive non-native species as well as changes in land use as potential drivers of native biodiversity patterns, and (4) demonstrate field and data analysis methods that may be applied to a large-scale biodiversity monitoring program. This is the vegetation structure dataset from 2015.
Biological diversity, or biodiversity, is the variety and abundance of species in a defined area, and is one of the oldest and most basic descriptions of biological communities. Understanding how populations and communities are structured and change over space and time in response to internal and external forces is a management priority. Effective management practices and conservation strategies depend on our understanding of the relationship between changes in biodiversity and ecological drivers such as invasive species, land use and climate change. To demonstrate how changes in biodiversity may be monitored over a large (400 km2) tract of native forest habitat, we compared bird and plant community composition and structure in an upper montane region of Hawai‘i Island originally surveyed in 1977 as part of the Hawai‘i Forest Bird Survey (Scott et al. 1986) with a comprehensive sample of the same region in 2015.
