Habitat Evaluation of Abandoned Nest Sites of Crested Ibis Outside the Crested Ibis National Nature Reserve in Shaanxi Province
Author of the article:YAN Wenbo1, ZHANG Haibin2, ZHANG Junhu1, WANG Qi1, TAO Xiaobin2
Author's Workplace：(1. School of Bioscience and Engineering, Shaanxi University of Technology, Hanzhong, Shaanxi Province 723001, China; 2. Hanzhong City Wildlife Conservation and Management Station, Hanzhong, Shaanxi Province 723001, China)
Key Words：crested ibis; abandoned nest; habitat; human disturbance
Abstract：To study the characteristics of abandoned nests of crested ibis, we investigated the habitat factors of abandoned nests and successful breeding nests of a dispersing population outside the Crested Ibis National Nature Reserve in Shaanxiprovince (China) from April to July in 2013. We obtained the habitat factors from 11 abandoned nests and 18 successful breeding nests of crested ibis. Mann-Whitney U-test was used to test differences of the habitat factors between the abandoned nests and successful breeding nests. The results showed that the abandoned nest was significantly different on the distance to road, number of nest trees and slope from that of the successful breeding nests. The results indicated that human disturbance might be an important factor to crested ibis to abandon the nest. Therefore, intensifying the conserving nest trees would be effective for the population increase of dispersing crested ibis outside the Crested Ibis National Nature Reserve.