| Knowledge of the land cover area size below which species will no longer persist will contribute to the planning efforts of landholders and policy makers as land quality deteriorates over time due to various forms of degradation and loss. Using the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) atlas (1988-1991), I related the change in distributions of focal bird species over time with areas of land cover assemblages that were quantified using remotely sensed data from the Land Cover Map of Great Britain (LCMGB, 1990). I studied two species known to be specializing in declining land covers to determine when suitable land cover had been reduced to a non-persistence threshold. Logistic regression and principal component analysis results suggest that resident Black Grouse species are well suited to such analyses (limited by the resolution of the BTO atlases), with the approximate minimum suitable woodland land cover area needed for persistence being 2.5 km2. |
