Impacts of land use on bird communities in the Western Himalaya: Insights from a two‐decade‐long monitoring program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anthropogenic land use change due to farming and livestock grazing has altered biodiversity composition greatly in ecosystems around the world. This is especially true in grasslands and rangelands; however, these ecosystems in high-altitude regions remain understudied. Moreover, anthropogenic effects in these habitats in the long term remain poorly understood. We studied bird densities and composition across four different habitats along a gradient of intensity of land use (crop fields, grazed meadows, grazed steppe, and ungrazed steppe), in the Trans-Himalayan region of Spiti Valley in Himachal Pradesh, India. Started in 2002, this continuing study is one of the longest running bird monitoring programs in India. We found that bird community composition differed significantly along the land use intensity gradient. Although crop fields had the highest bird densities, the bird community here was homogenized, comprising mainly habitat generalist species. Ungrazed steppe harbored more habitat specialist species and high bird densities. Grazed habitats were generally unfavorable for birds, with lower densities and possibly lower species richness. Decadal changes in densities revealed declines in the least used ungrazed steppe habitat, highlighting a possible role of climate change. Our study underscores the importance of land use type in affecting avifauna in the Trans-Himalaya. Holistic land management practices, including continuing traditional (organic) farming and maintaining ungrazed patches in grazed rangelands, could help maintain coexistence between biodiversity and people in these multiuse landscapes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".