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1 January 2020 Nonbreeding Bird Communities Along an Urban–Rural Gradient of a Tropical City in Central Myanmar
Marcela Suarez-Rubio, Thein Aung, Sai Sein Lin Oo, Nay Myo Shwe, Nay Myo Hlaing, Kyaw Myo Naing, Tun Oo, Mie Mie Sein, Swen C. Renner
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Abstract

Urbanization is known to be a major driver in abundance and species richness of birds. However, how birds respond to urbanization in tropical cities is understudied in general and entirely absent from Myanmar. We conducted a study in and around Mandalay, a large city in central Myanmar to gather first data on birds and their response to urbanization. We selected four habitats with 10 sampling points each in November 2015. We made 1,536 observations of 68 bird species. The number of species and diversity significantly differed between the four localities. Mandalay Hill and Downtown Mandalay had the lowest number of species and diversity, whereas the University Campus and Paddy Fields had the highest. The highest number of observations was in Downtown Mandalay (1,003 counts) and the lowest on Mandalay Hill (103). Nonmetric multidimensional scaling ordination techniques showed that the four habitat types had significantly different bird species composition. Our results indicate a large effect of urbanization on species diversity, species richness, and species composition of birds.

© The Author(s) 2016 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Marcela Suarez-Rubio, Thein Aung, Sai Sein Lin Oo, Nay Myo Shwe, Nay Myo Hlaing, Kyaw Myo Naing, Tun Oo, Mie Mie Sein, and Swen C. Renner "Nonbreeding Bird Communities Along an Urban–Rural Gradient of a Tropical City in Central Myanmar," Tropical Conservation Science 9(4), (1 January 2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/1940082916675961
Received: 11 July 2016; Accepted: 13 September 2016; Published: 1 January 2020
KEYWORDS
bird diversity
Mandalay
Myanmar
point counts
urbanization
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