Effects of habitat restoration on peatland bird communities

Abstract

Restoration of damaged ecosystems has become an important tool to slow down the biodiversity loss and to maintain ecosystem services. Peatland bird populations have shown a substantial decline during the recent decades in Northern Europe as a consequence of peatland drainage. We studied whether restoration of peatlands drained for forestry affects bird communities. We conducted bird surveys at 11 peatlands in Western Finland, where each of the restored and their pristine counterparts were surveyed before restoration and yearly after restoration during 2010–2018. We used linear mixed effect models to analyze whether restoration affected the number of species and territories of peatland specialist and non‐specialist species and permutational multivariate analysis of variance to analyze the change in community composition. Drained parts of the peatlands had higher number of territories of non‐specialist species before restoration, and restoration seemed to decrease these numbers towards the level of pristine parts. By contrast, restoration did not affect the number of peatland specialists and their territories, which was lower in drained than in pristine parts of the peatlands. Bird communities in restored parts remained different from pristine parts in terms of community composition after restoration. Thus, despite the effect of restoration on non‐specialists, a substantially long time may be required for a recovery of the peatland bird communities. Based on our results, it seems that long term monitoring of the restored and pristine peatlands is needed to determine whether restoration is effective in recovering the peatland specialist bird species and bird communities in general.