The impact of Hurricane Harvey along the central coast of Texas in August 2017 provided a valuable opportunity to investigate how bird communities respond in the year immediately following an acute disturbance event. We paired a localized dataset with a wider regional dataset to investigate how bird communities responded at two different spatial scales. We used an existing long-term dataset from the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) program to investigate immediate changes in avian diversity on a local scale at the Welder Wildlife Refuge (WWR). To investigate regional shifts, we used data from eBird that covered a six-county area in central coastal Texas. Project eBird is a large-scale citizen science project that collects observational data from birdwatchers in the form of “checklists”. Species richness, abundance, and diversity were analyzed for the breeding season using MAPS data from the three years immediately pre-Harvey (2015, 2016, and 2017) and in the one year post-Harvey (2018). Breeding season (May-July) data from eBird was analyzed for selected passerine species. Diversity and abundance metrics were analyzed through Species Richness (S), Shannon’s Diversity Index (H’), and List Length Analysis for the three years pre-Harvey (2015, 2016, and 2017) and in the year immediately post-Harvey (2018).
Results/Conclusions
Preliminary results indicate a high level of post-disturbance resilience within this coastal Texas ecosystem. Analysis of MAPS data indicate a significant annual increase in H' (P=0.02), but no significant difference in overall S across all years (P=0.56). After excluding all non-breeding species and species of which only one individual was captured in a given sampling year, there was again no significant difference in S (P= 0.11). These results suggest minimal lasting impacts of Hurricane Harvey on songbird diversity at the WWR. Preliminary analysis of eBird data suggests no significant regional shifts in avian diversity on a regional scale, but species-specific fluctuations are evident in the year immediately following Hurricane Harvey. Continued localized monitoring alongside the integration of larger regional citizen-science datasets, or ecological “big data”, can give researchers clearer insights regarding how the effects of acute disturbances may be exemplified across a variety of spatial scales.