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How do bird species richness and abundance differ between military training areas and surrounding landscape? A case study from the Hradiště military area
Bušek, Ondřej ; Reif, Jiří (advisor) ; Koleček, Jaroslav (referee)
Since the beginning of the 20th century human land use changed drastically in Central Europe. These changes included: homogenization of the landscape mosaic, intensification of agriculture, urbanization and land abandonment. In turn, these changes affected bird species and perhaps most significantly manifested in population decline of open habitat birds. Therefore, it is important to investigate sites, which were not affected by the changes mentioned above, such as military training areas (MTAs) - places dedicated to training of armed forces. Previous studies have shown that MTAs seem to host remarkably high bird diversity and abundant populations of bird species of conservation concern. This may be caused by two major factors. First, closure of MTAs to all human activies besides military training spared them of the landscape changes mentioned above. Second, the military training itself produces a very heterogeneous habitat mosaic that allows coexistence of many species with different ecological requirements. To my knowledge, no study compared bird assemblages between MTAs and surrounding landscape directly. At the same time, such data are crucial to assess the value of MTAs for bird conservation reliably and, as a consequence, they enable to think more deeply about mechanism generating this value....
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