Avian Communities In Zijin Mountain Urban Forest Of Nanjing City

Zijin Mountain Urban forest is a famous beauty spot lies in Nanjing city which has important social and ecological function. But the research on avian community of Zijin Mountain has not been reported yet. In this paper the avian fauna in 4 typical habitats (bamboo forest, coniferous forest, broadleaved forest, landscape area) of Zijin Mountain Urban forest was investigated from April 2007 to March 2008. The bird species, abundance, spatial and temporal patterns, habitat factors and human disturbance on avian community were analyzed.1. There are 107 species of birds belong to 35 families and 12 orders was first recorded formally according to the result of investigation. Resident and summer birds are the main part of the avian migration types, and summer breeders accounting for 71.97% of the total species. Most of the birds are Oriental species and also have intergradation character. There is a distinct change of bird species between seasons: The species number came to peak in spring and autumn, summer takes the second place and winter is the last.2. The characteristics of community structure in 4 habitats such as species richness, density, dominant species, Shannon-wienner index, species evenness, dominance are compared and discussed. The results show that each characteristics of coniferous forest avian community is the lowest in 4 habitats. Bamboo forest community is litter higher than coniferous forest but the seasonal change was tiny. Broadleaved forest avian community has higher richness than above two habitats, and the highest similarity with landscape avian community. Compared with others habitat, the landscape avian community has the highest species number, density, diversity of landscape due to the diversity of vegetation and landform of this habitat.3. Influence of the habitat factors on avian community is analyzed. The results show that: vegetation diversity, habitat type diversity and human intensity affect the bamboo forest avian community most. In coniferous forest habitat, avian community characters had positively correlated with the total area of arbor and height diversity of tree. Vegetation diversity,the total area of arbor and habitat type diversity are the most distinct factors for broadleaved forest avian community. In landscape habitat, avian density is positively correlated with habitat diversity, the species number and diversity has certain relationship with total area of arbor and vegetation diversity.4. Avian species, density and diversity of landscape habitat with highest human intensity degree is obviously high than the other three habitats. The research results show that characters of avian community are positively correlated with the diversity of bird-feed trees. Through the analysis of the trends of average flush distance of 10 birds in different degrees of human intensity, it is found that the flush distance is decreased along with the increasing of human intensity degree. It implies that the species in urban sites has more tolerance to human disturbance than species in natural sites. The high diversity of bird-feed trees and the tolerance of avian to human disturbance are the important reasons for avian community of landscape habitat has higher bird species, density and diversity than others habitats.