EVSC30006 Ecology of Urban Landscapes 2026
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River Valley Birds: Data analysis and practical report



Overall Aims
To assess the composition of bird communities in three habitat types at River Valley: the river
corridor, the business-as-usual (BAU) landscape (characterised by a lawn nature strip with a
single street tree), and the biodiversity sensitive urban design (BSUD) landscape.

Questions we will be addressing
1) Which bird species from the river corridor are also found in each type of urban
landscape?
2) Does the BSUD landscape support more species of all birds/native birds than the BAU
landscape?
3) How similar or different are the bird communities in each type of urban landscape?
4) Are fewer birds (both species and individuals) observed as you move further away from
the river?

Procedure
1. Upload the summary dataset provided (River_Valley_Summary_Data.csv) to the free
graphics website, rawgraphs.io
2. Explore relationships between the birds observed and the three habitats using different
graph styles (e.g., an alluvial diagram, chord diagram, bar charts, Sankey diagram).
Which of these provide useful visual information? Download the graphs you make to
use in your practical report.
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3. Open the full dataset (River_Valley_full_dataset.xlsx). You can use these data to address
Questions 1, 2 and 4.
4. For Question 3, there are a variety of ways to measure compositional similarity (e.g.,
Jaccard’s coefficient, Shannon Diversity Index) – try a couple of these calculations. Are
they providing you with useful information and a way to discriminate between the bird
communities in the different habitat types?
5. In class, I will show you a Principal Components Analysis, which is one approach for
analysing multivariate data.
6. THINK: what factors could be influencing the observed relationships (or lack thereof)
between the bird communities and the three habitat types?


Practical Report
Prepare a Practical Report in the scientific style covering the methods and results from Practical
2 – River Valley Birds. You must have the following sections:

Introduction: Introduce the topic. What factors might be influencing the distribution of birds
and the composition of bird communities in urban and urbanising landscapes?

Aims: State the aims of the current report. Do not state that it is a practical report; please write
this as if it were a journal article or scientific report.

Methods: Due to the word limit make this very brief: 1-2 sentences

Results: Report the results of your analysis (both graphical and numerical) and the answers to
the four questions. Are these indicating important differences between the bird communities
across the three habitat types?

Remember to explain your results in words (referencing any graphs and numerical calculations).

Discussion: You will need to read some scientific papers on the topic of bird communities in the
urban landscape and how the presence of different groups/guilds may be influenced by the
availability of key habitats/resources and the presence of other species at a given location. In
the discussion, it is important to provide a brief statement of your findings, and to give some
information about the strengths and weaknesses of your study. Most of the discussion should
be about how your results fit with or relate to the results of other studies, and interpreting
what your results might mean for the conservation of birds in urban environments.

Some of the questions you may wish to address in the Discussion include:
• How could we increase the diversity and abundance of bird communities in urban
Melbourne?
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• What are the implications of your findings for planning or managing urban areas to
support native birds?
• How could this study be strengthened?

Your discussion should include a concluding statement or short paragraph, but you don’t need a
specific conclusion section within this report.

Reference list: List the references you have used in your report, in alphabetical order by first-
author surname. Choose a referencing style (e.g., APA or the style used by the journal
Landscape and Urban Planning) and use it consistently, for both in-text citations and the
reference list.

Word limit: 800 words excluding figures, tables, figure captions and references. Please provide
a word count at the end of the report. Reports over 1000 words excluding figures, tables and
references will be penalised by 5%.

More information on referencing:
- Make use of the references provided during the lectures about the responses of fauna to
urbanisation.
- Use library journal searches (Web of Science, Scopus, etc.) to extend your understanding.
- A minimum of 7 references is required for your prac report. This means peer-reviewed
primary literature (NOT lectures, NOT websites that use other information).

Here are some relevant references to get you started. It is important to do your own literature search
to add to these papers.

Humphrey, J. E., Haslem, A., & Bennett, A. F. (2023). Housing or habitat: what drives patterns of avian
species richness in urbanized landscapes? Landscape Ecology, 38(8), 1919-1937.

Kath, J., Maron, M. and Dunn, P.K., 2009. Interspecific competition and small bird diversity in an
urbanizing landscape. Landscape and Urban Planning, 92(2), 72–79.

Parsons, H., French, K. and Major, R.E., 2008. The vegetation requirements of superb fairy-wrens
(Malurus cyaneus) in non-urban edge and urbanised habitats. Emu-Austral Ornithology, 108(4),
283–291.

Trollope, S.T., White, J.G. and Cooke, R., 2009. The response of ground and bark foraging
insectivorous birds across an urban–forest gradient. Landscape and Urban Planning, 93(2), 142–
150.

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