A study in the relationship between greenery of urban parks and bird diversity in Tainan City Taiwan

Abstract

Green space is important for the maintenance of the ecological dimension of a sustainable urban landscape. Therefore, in order to figure out the relationship between the greening of urban parks and bird diversity, we used 5 avian ecological diversity indexes, such as Species richness, Abundance, Shannon- Weiner diversity index, Evenness, and Margalef’s richness indices, to evaluate the functionality of different types of urban parks. Therefore, birds in 17 parks were surveyed with the circular-plot method from August of 2004 to April of 2005; meanwhile, the greening level of urban park of Tainan city in Taiwan was measured by remote sensing method. As the result, overall there was higher bird species richness in higher greening level parks. Our findings emphasize the importance of urban park with abundant greening to maintain high ecological diversity. Thus, we suggest that increasing greening level of urban parks can promote the bird diversity in urban area. Keywords: urban habitat, biodiversity, normalized difference vegetation index. 1 Introduction According to governmental statistics, 77.7% of the nation’s population dwells in urban area which only occupies 12.5% of the country’s area. In order to accommodate such high population density, urban expansion is inevitable. Without appropriate consideration of the ecosystem during urban planning, such expansion will transform natural habitat into all sorts of man-made constructions, thus destroying the urban ecological environment. Urban habitats differ from natural environments in several aspects.