G.D. Daniels

Attitude and action syndromes of exurban landowners have little effect on native mammals in exurbia

Private property is increasingly important for nature conservation, and exurbia an increasingly prominent form of private land use. There have been very few studies of the attitudes of exurban landowners to nature, all of which indicate a high degree of biophilia, and no studies of the effect of variation in the attitudes and actions of these landowners on wild mammal assemblages on their properties. A questionnaire survey of landowners was combined with spotlight observations of fauna on their properties to test the attitudes of the landowners to nature and the null hypothesis that syndromes of landowner attitudes to nature, and actions in relation to nature, have no effect on wild mammals at the property scale. All respondents were positive about native wild animals and trees. Four groups of landowners (biophiles, autocrats, idealists and utilitarians) derived by a classification of ordination scores based on attitude and action question responses, were different in their attitudes towards native wild mammals, exotic wild mammals and trees. However, their properties did not differ in the presence or frequency of any native wild mammal species. There were statistical relationships between the presence/absence of native wild animal species and indices related to intervention, fondness of trees, aversion to trees, fondness of native animals, and fondness of exotic animals. However, with the possible exception of the tendency of the common brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) to be absent from properties owned by the people who least liked wild animals, the association of native animals with attitude or action indices appeared to be coincidental. It therefore seems that programs directed towards influencing the attitudes of landowners to wildlife may be ineffective in conserving wildlife in exurbia.

Ecology and Conservation of Australian Urban and Exurban Avifauna

We review the literature on the ecology and conservation of Australian urban birds and report the results of the first Australian study on the relationship between avifauna and habitat variation in exurbia, which is the low-density zone of development on the outer margins of a city. The Australian urban avifauna has synanthropes found widely elsewhere. It also has a large number of native species, some of which are globally threatened. The distribution of species in Australian urban areas relates better to their niche characteristics than their nativity or exoticness and better to very local variations in habitat type than to environmental variation at the landscape scale, which is often masked by the vegetation thickening associated with suburbanisation. In two exurban regions of Hobart, Tasmania, we sampled birds in unmodified wildland forest (native forests away from development), unmodified exurban forest (native forest on exurban properties), modified exurban forest (native forest on exurban properties and with the understorey removed), exurban gardens and exurban paddocks (cleared land). We tested the hypotheses that exurban habitats were different in bird species compositions from wildlands, that similarity in avifaunal assemblages within habitats increased with the degree of human interference and that, within dry open forests, the perforation (small clearances) and fragmentation associated with exurbanisation would be associated with populations of an aggressive small-bird-excluding edge species, the noisy miner Manorina melanocephala. The noisy miner occurred on old land clearance boundaries and not at all in recent forest perforations. In the absence of noisy miners, exurban bird species assemblages were organised by habitat, with the greatest internal consistency being within gardens. In both regions, paddocks had more heterogeneous bird assemblages than expected, and wildlands had identical species assemblages to unmodified exurban forests, but not to other habitat types. The mixture of habitats characteristic of exurbia may not necessarily be detrimental for avifaunal conservation as long as it includes substantial areas of undisturbed native vegetation, even though exurban development may be undesirable for other reasons. We conclude that it is the distinctiveness and high beta diversity of urban and exurban habitats that create opportunities for a wide variety of native and exotic bird species, that local manipulations and creations of urban and exurban habitat can substantially affect avifaunal conservation outcomes and that urban bird management should be a major component of many species recovery plans.