Revegetation and the significance of timelags in provision of habitat resources for birds

Abstract

In many approaches to landscape visualisation and reconstruction for biodiversity management, vegetation is represented as being either present or absent. Revegetation is assumed to be possible, and new vegetation appears ‘immediately’ in a mature state, which is likely to drastically overestimate habitat suitability in the short-term. We constructed a simple temporal model of resource provision from revegetated agricultural land to estimate habitat suitability indices for woodland birds in south-eastern Australia. We used this model to illustrate the trajectory of change in biodiversity benefits of revegetation. As vegetation matures, its suitability for a given species changes, so a time-i..