PARENT SESSION
Poster Session 39: Late Breaking and Newsworthy Posters
Friday, August 12, 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM, Exhibit Hall 220 A-E, Level 2, Palais des congrès de Montréal
The biodiversity value of human-dominated land use in Hawaii.
Pejchar, Liba*,1, Daily, Gretchen1, Goldman, Becca1, Vitousek, Peter2, 1 Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford, CA, USA2 Biological Sciences, Stanford, CA, USA
ABSTRACT- Restoring habitat for biodiversity increasingly depends on making reforestation economically attractive and commonplace on private land. We are assessing the biodiversity value, economic viability, and policy opportunities for win-win land use in the Kona District of Hawaii. We conducted bird and plant surveys to determine biodiversity value on replicates of four land uses: mature forest, native tree plantations, pasture with remnant trees, and open pastureland. We found that native bird density and diversity did not differ among forest, tree plantations and mixed pasture/tree sites, but these land uses did support significantly more birds than pastureland. We explain the lack of difference in native bird communities among our three land use types with tree cover by demonstrating that the relationship between bird density and tree density in this landscape is a strongly positive, saturating curve, i.e. investing in a small amount of tree cover results in a big payoff for native birds. This result suggests that human-dominated lands, such as native plantations and ranches with tree cover, can support large native bird populations relative to forests managed for conservation. However, we also found that understory plants were most abundant and diverse in forest and infrequent on all other land use types. Thus, land use that is adequate or excellent for birds is not necessarily suitable for plants. Strategic incentives to help landowners restore or maintain tree cover, while continuing to profit from their land, could result in extraordinarily benefit to native birds. Substantially greater incentives, however, will be necessary to sustain diverse plant communities on these working lands. Our next steps are to integrate these results with economic models and to identify those policy tools that will both enable reforestation and benefit landowners.
Key words: conservation on private land, biodiversity, reforestation, hawaii