The Methodology Of Bird Habitats' Making And Planning At Beijing Urban Green Spaces

The urban biodiversity is an essential part of urban human settlement. It contributes to meeting the needs of city citizens to contact integrated nature. The richness of bird community is always used as the indicator to evaluate the status of urban biodiversity and the quality of urban bird habitat. The urban bird habitat is with biological and non-biological attributes.Field survey of the bird community, the biological factors(the richness of plant and insect communities), along with measuring non-biological environmental factors were conducted from 2012 to 2014. We totally obtain 792 species, including 395 plants,261 insects and 136 birds. With test on the effect of “passive sampling”, this study used path analysis with a Structural Equation Model(SEM) in R software to explore the causal relationship among the non-environmental factors, richness of bird communities,plant communities and insect communities. The size of green space in each park is a positive significant variable to the richness of bird communities. The percent of green spaces 200 m around each urban park exerted positive effects on the richness of breeding bird community significantly, so as to the percent of coniferous woods. The richness of insects affected that of birds positively and significantly. The richness of ground flora affected that of insect communities and they exerted joint positive effect on the richness of breeding birds.Birds are with high level of mobility. Birds with different ecological types use the urban green spaces in differetrn ways during their life histoty. The urban bird habitats in the urban green spaces can be classified into 3 categories. In the range of urban built area, the urban bird habitats existed in three levels: habitat system, habitat patch and micro habitats, which can be conducted respectively by planning, design and management.The raptors make use of the living resource they can obtain from the whole range of urban area. The scale of habitats for water fowls is similar with the level of human beings, while the forest birds perched in the lower level habitats. The resident birds are more predominant in the urban parks comparing with the summer migrant birds. The urban bird habitat system planning includes: 1) obtaining the basic data of bird communities and their habitats, 2) biotope mapping of water and woods habitats, 3)evaluating on the quality of habitats and strategies to improve them. When making bird habitats, it is crucial to control the distance between the touring route and the effective habitats. This study suggested quantitative methods in terms of the habitat scale/type,the layout of park design and the crucial structures of space making.Considering the subjective and objective factors, “visibility” is used to distinguish the often-seen and rare-seen bird species. Based on this, bird watching guide planning is made to connect the nature appreciation to urban daily life on the habitat system level.On the habitat patch level, Qingnianhu Park is taken as an example to illustrate the methods of bird habitats' making. It is crucial to maintain an area without human disturbance, the water eco-system, the wildness of vegetation and prevent using pesticide to improve the quality of bird habitats in urban parks. Landscape planning is an effective strategy which can integrate multi-disciplines to maintain the urban biodiversity. Landscape planning and design can expand to make environment full of various vivid creatures and melodious warble rather than only focusing on making landscape images and three-dimensional spaces. That is more beneficial to the mental recovery of human beings.