Elsevier

Biological Conservation

Volume 166, October 2013, Pages 34-42
Biological Conservation

Sacred forests are keystone structures for forest bird conservation in southwest China’s Himalayan Mountains

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2013.06.014Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We surveyed birds and their habitat in and around Tibetan sacred forests.

  • Sacred forests increased bird diversity at multiple spatial scales.

  • Sacred forests supported bird communities not found in the surrounding landscape.

  • Sacred forests may serve as refuges during extreme weather years.

  • Sacred forests represent an important opportunity for Himalayan bird conservation.

Abstract

Identifying and protecting “keystone structures” is essential to maintain biodiversity in an increasingly human-dominated world. Sacred forests, i.e. natural areas protected by local people for cultural or religious regions, may be keystone structures for forest birds in the Greater Himalayas, but there is limited understanding of their use by bird communities. We surveyed birds and their habitat in and adjacent to six Tibetan sacred forests in northwest Yunnan China, a biodiversity hotspot. Our goal was to understand the ecological and conservation role of these remnant forest patches for forest birds. We found that sacred forests supported a different bird community than the surrounding matrix, and had higher bird species richness at plot, patch, and landscape scales. While we encountered a homogeneous matrix bird community outside the scared forests, the sacred forests themselves exhibited high heterogeneity, and supported at least two distinct bird communities. While bird community composition was primarily driven by the vegetation vertical structure, plots with the largest-diameter trees and native bamboo groves had the highest bird diversity, indicating that protecting forest ecosystems with old-growth characteristics is important for Himalayan forest birds. Finally, we found an increased bird use of the sacred forests and their edges during 2010, a severe drought year in Yunnan, indicating that sacred forests may serve as refuges during extreme weather years. Our results strongly indicate that sacred forests represent an important opportunity for Himalayan bird conservation because they protect a variety of habitat niches and increase bird diversity at multiple spatial scales.

Introduction

As humans consume an ever-increasing proportion of the Earth’s resources, biodiversity declines at an accelerating rate (Chapin et al., 2000, Foley et al., 2005), making the protection of “keystone structures”, i.e., discrete spatial features that maintain biodiversity at multiple spatial scales, ever more important (Belsky and Canham, 1994, Manning et al., 2006, Stagoll et al., 2012, Tews et al., 2004). For example, forest gaps, large trees, and temporary wetlands are keystone structures whose presence adds heterogeneity to the resources available in landscapes, facilitating greater species richness. The question is how to identify such keystone structures, and how to protect them.

Sacred forests, i.e., natural areas protected by local people for cultural or religious reasons (Dudley et al., 2009), may be keystone structures for biodiversity in traditional landscapes around the world. Sacred forests are numerous, dispersed across a broad range of topographic and micro-climatic conditions, and range in size from a single hectare to thousands of square kilometers (Ormsby, 2011). As such, they likely serve multiple ecological functions, including as corridors, refugia, and source habitats (Bhagwat and Rutte, 2006, Dudley et al., 2010). Sacred forests may be critical components of protected area networks (Verschuren et al., 2010), but we have little understanding of their potential role for biodiversity conservation, especially in the less-studied biodiversity hotspots.

The traditional land management systems that sustain sacred forests may create optimum conditions for species diversity at multiple spatial scales. For example, sacred forests are typically managed by communities (Dudley et al., 2009) and often experience a gradient of human disturbance (UNESCO-MAB, 2003), where a variety of organisms can utilize variable resource conditions (Belsky and Canham, 1994). In addition, sacred forests are typically embedded in landscapes with matrix habitats that are hospitable to at least some species, and thus conventional assumptions of patch size and fragmentation effects (MacArthur and Wilson, 1967) may not apply (Prugh et al., 2008). Furthermore, the edges between sacred forests and their matrix are often not abrupt barriers, but a gradient of disturbance to levels characteristic of the surrounding matrix. These edges may serve as “ecotones”, facilitating ecological interactions between the patch and the matrix, and offering supplementary resources not available in the core habitats (Ries et al., 2004). Despite their potential importance for species dispersal and persistence, we have little understanding of how sacred forests are influenced by patch size, edge effects, and interactions between patch and matrix habitats.

One region where sacred forests are relatively common are the Himalayan mountains (Barbhuiya et al., 2010, Luo et al., 2003, Mallarach, 2008, Salick et al., 2007, UNESCO-MAB, 2003, Xu et al., 2005). Several ethnic minority groups recognize sacred areas as part of their religion, including sacred beyuls (which protect entire valleys), sacred mountains (10s to 100s of km2), and village-level sacred forests (1–1000 ha). The Himalayan mountains also contain three biodiversity hotspots (Myers et al., 2000) and forest birds are of special conservation concern (Renner, 2011). The region exhibits high levels of bird diversity and endemism and ranks highest in global assessments of threatened bird species richness (Grenyer et al., 2006). Many forest bird species in the Greater Himalayas follow a Sino-Himalayan distribution (Renner, 2011, Renner and Rappole, 2011), which includes the Himalayan range, the mountains of southwest China, and the Qinghai Tibetan plateau (Fig. 1a). Forest degradation has accelerated throughout this region in recent decades (Brandt et al., 2012, Renner et al., 2007, Spehn et al., 2010), destroying bird habitats (Dumbacher et al., 2011). Sacred areas may be critical for bird conservation throughout this rapidly changing region, but their importance for Himalayan forest bird communities across multiple spatial extents is not well understood.

Our overarching objective was to understand the role of sacred forests for the conservation of Himalayan forest birds. We studied bird communities within and outside of Tibetan sacred forests in northwest Yunnan, China, with the following specific objectives:

  • 1.

    Determine whether bird community composition and diversity is different within sacred forests compared to the surrounding matrix.

  • 2.

    Identify the critical habitat characteristics structuring bird diversity, abundance, and community composition.

  • 3.

    Investigate how patch size and edge habitats influence bird community composition, diversity and abundance patterns.

Section snippets

Study area

Our study area is in Shangrila, northwest Yunnan Province, China (Fig. 1a). Northwest Yunnan is a biodiversity hotspot in the Hengduan Mountains of the southeastern sub-Himalayan mountains, bordering Myanmar, Tibet and Sichuan Province. Three major rivers (the Yangtze, Mekong, and Salween) create steep gorges, with elevations ranging from 1800 to 6740 m, creating a large array of ecological niches in a relatively small area.

Northwest Yunnan has great importance for local, regional, and global

Habitat

The 62 plots captured a wide range of variability in vegetation disturbance, structure and species composition (see Appendix S1 in Supporting Information). PCA identified two prominent habitat gradients in our study area (Fig. 2a). The first axis (eigenvalue = 3.59, explaining 44.8% of the variance) corresponded to differences between sacred and matrix habitats, which had significantly different vegetation composition and structure in the canopy, sub-canopy and ground layers (see Appendix S2).

Sacred forests as keystone structures

Our results indicated that Tibetan sacred forests conserved some characteristics of old-growth forests, and thus protected unique forest bird communities in the Chinese Himalayan mountains. In addition, sacred forests had the highest bird diversity of all habitats at multiple spatial scales and in both years. Since detection probabilities were considerably lower in the sacred forests compared to their matrix, it is likely that our estimates of differences are conservative, and that sacred

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by NSF IGERT Grant No. DGE-0549369, a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship and an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Enhancement Program Grant. We gratefully thank W.Y. Song and M. Haynes for assistance in the field, and J. Posner and T. Allendorf for logistical support. We thank R. Hart and the Kunming Institute of Botany for providing precipitation data from the Shangrila weather station. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments which greatly improved

References (63)

  • D. Anderson et al.

    Conserving the sacred medicine mountains: a vegetation analysis of Tibetan sacred sites in Northwest Yunnan

    Biodivers. Conserv.

    (2005)
  • Barbhuiya, A., Khan, M., Arunachalam, A., Prabhu, S., Chavan, V., 2010. Sacred groves: informal protected areas in the...
  • A. Belsky et al.

    Forest Gaps and Isolated Savanna Trees: an application of patch dynamics in two ecosystems

    Bioscience

    (1994)
  • S. Bhagwat et al.

    Sacred groves: potential for biodiversity management

    Front. Ecol. Environ.

    (2006)
  • C. Bo et al.

    Indigenous knowledge of forest management in Northwest Yunnan

    SYLFF Work. Paper.

    (2003)
  • S. Buckland et al.

    Distance Sampling

    (2001)
  • K. Burnham et al.

    Model Selection and Multimodal Inference: A Practical Information Theoretic Approach

    (2002)
  • M. Carr

    PRIMER User Manual (Plymouth Routines in Multivariate Ecological Research)

    (1997)
  • F. Chapin et al.

    Consequences of changing biodiversity

    Nature

    (2000)
  • T.h. Cheng

    A Synopsis of the Avifauna of China

    (1987)
  • K. Clarke et al.

    PRIMER v6: User Manual/Tutorial

    (2006)
  • Colwell, R., 2009. EstimateS: Statistical Estimation of Species Richness and Shared Species from Samples. Version 8.2....
  • Dudley, N., Bhagwat, S.A., Higgins-Zogib, L., Lassen, B., Verschuren, B., Wild, R., 2010. Conservation of biodiversity...
  • N. Dudley et al.

    The links between protected areas, faiths, and sacred natural sites

    Conserv. Biol.

    (2009)
  • J. Dumbacher et al.

    Avifauna of the Gaoligong Shan Mountains of Western China: a hotspot of avian species diversity

    Ornithol. Monograph.

    (2011)
  • J.A. Foley et al.

    Global consequences of land use

    Science

    (2005)
  • J. González-Oreja et al.

    Assessing the performance of nonparametric estimators of species richness in meadows

    Biodivers. Conserv.

    (2010)
  • R. Grenyer et al.

    Global distribution and conservation of rare and threatened vertebrates

    Nature

    (2006)
  • J. Harkness

    Recent trends in forestry and conservation of biodiversity in China

    China Quart.

    (1998)
  • F.-M. Lei et al.

    Priorities for the conservation of avian biodiversity in China based on the distribution patterns of endemic bird genera

    Biodivers. Conserv.

    (2003)
  • J.G. Liu et al.

    Ecological and socioeconomic effects of China’s policies for ecosystem services

    Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

    (2008)
  • Cited by (43)

    • Sacred oak woods increase bird diversity and specialization: Links with the European Biodiversity Strategy for 2030

      2021, Journal of Environmental Management
      Citation Excerpt :

      Our results highlighted the greater conservation value of sacred groves than managed forests for avian communities since they supported significantly more bird species with a greater abundance of individuals. This pattern has been reported for sacred forests in Tibet (Brandt et al., 2013) but not for a previous study in Greece (Avtzis et al., 2018). The findings of Avtzis et al. (2018) might have masked the conservational significance of sacred groves since different vegetation types (coniferous, evergreen, and deciduous woods) and a small sample size (n = 8) were considered.

    • Redistribution of large and medium-sized mammals in a sacred natural site, western China

      2020, Journal for Nature Conservation
      Citation Excerpt :

      In some special sacred natural sites, such as Tibetan sacred mountains, supplementary food is often provided by local monks and pilgrims for wildlife during their pilgrimages to worship the local deities (Lu & Zheng, 2003; Shen, Lu, Li, & Chen, 2012; Yang et al., 2016). Thus, sacred natural sites are suggested to have significance for conserving biodiversity (Bhagwat & Rutte, 2006; Brandt et al., 2013; Shen, Lu et al., 2012). Many studies have identified sacred natural sites as important for the conservation of vegetation and plant diversity.

    • Examining a bias in evaluating conservation effectiveness for Galliformes on a typical Tibetan sacred mountain

      2019, Global Ecology and Conservation
      Citation Excerpt :

      Buddhists did not worship in the matrix to which access was generally not restricted. The matrix suffered from human pressures such as grazing, logging, infrastructure, and potential hunting, as reported in many other Tibetan areas (e.g., Brandt et al., 2013; Shen et al., 2015; Li et al., 2018). The matrix was similar to the sacred mountain in terms of topographical features and vegetation, but habitat structure was different between the two sites.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text