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- Title
Dynamics and Viability of a New Zealand Robin Population Reintroduced to Regenerating Fragmented Habitat.
- Authors
Armstrong, Doug P.; Ewen, John G.
- Abstract
New Zealand Robins ( Petroica australis ) were reintroduced to Tiritiri Matangi, a highly modified island undergoing an extensive revegetation program. The island had only 13 ha of fragmented forest likely to be suitable for robins. We wished to determine whether the population was likely to persist until additional habitat became available through maturation of the revegetation and, therefore, whether it was sensible to reintroduce this species early in the restoration program. We used an information-theoretic approach to model survival, fecundity, sex ratio, and juvenile dispersal for this population, based on data collected in the first 6 years after reintroduction. This involved nominating a limited set of plausible models for each process and then selecting the models that best explained the data based on Akaike's information criterion. We used mark-recapture analysis on survey data to model survival and general linear modeling on fecundity data. The best models were as follows: (1) juvenile survival declined as population size increased, whereas adult survival was constant among years; (2) fecundity was substantially lower for females in their first year after translocation and varied among forest patches, but did not vary among age classes or years; (3) the expected sex ratio of recruits was 50:50; (4) the distribution of recruits depended on the number of existing residents in patches and patch sizes, but not on patch isolation. We used VORTEX to simulate the dynamics of the population based on these models and associated parameter estimates. The population was predicted to have negligible chance of extinction over several decades under current conditions, and this prediction was not sensitive to uncertainty in parameter estimates or model structure. Maturation of the planted matrix should allow the population to expand to several hundred birds over the next few decades, preventing extreme loss of genetic variation. We therefore conclude that the early...
- Subjects
NEW Zealand; ROBINS; HABITATS; CONSERVATION biology
- Publication
Conservation Biology, 2002, Vol 16, Issue 4, p1074
- ISSN
0888-8892
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1046/j.1523-1739.2002.00215.x