Restoration Impact on Avian Biodiversity

The restoration of the estuary and surrounding upland habitats of UCSB’s North Campus Open Space (NCOS) successfully reintroduced tidal flow and many plant communities to the site, facilitating faunal recovery. As in many other restoration projects, monitoring data has been collected and reported but lacks comprehensive analysis. Here, I leveraged eight years of monthly bird survey data to study how bird assemblages have changed, with a focus on the most consistently detected avian species. Moreover, to understand bird population trends and community composition shifts, I used Bayesian General Linear Mixed Models and Non-Metric Multidimensional Scaling, respectively. The changes in these metrics provide insight into the effect of the NCOS restoration, evaluating its positive or negative results for individual species and their ecological functions.