Abstract

Birds are an essential group of the food chain in the ecosystem; they are contributing to the pollination, fighting against insect pests of crops and constitute also a source of income by the tourism. An ornithological study has been led in the Adamawa Plateau during two years, from 2018 to 2020. Indeed, the distribution of birds and the impact of the human activities upon them have not been sufficiently studied these last decades. This study aims to determine occurrences and the distribution of bird species in the Adamawa Plateau as well the impact of the anthropogenic activities in this area. To accomplish these purposes, several methods have been used. Thus, transect and Japanese mist nets methods were employed to capture bird specimens in the field, and then sampled birds were identified, photographed and instantly released in their wild environment. Ecological analyses were performed by the PAST v2.17 software. For that, the occurrences and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) in order to test the main element of variability in bird distribution between forest and savannah have been made. In addition, a modeling analysis has also been carried out to evaluate the impact of the anthropogenic activities. As results, 186 specimens have been collected from the study area and 61 species were identified. The most frequently species encountered in the Adamawa Plateau were Pycnonotus barbatus and Turdus pelios with 66.67% and 60%, respectively. According to our analysis of variance, the distribution of bird species in the study area is depending to the vegetation and we also carried out an aggregative spatial distribution pattern of bird species in the Adamawa Plateau. Our analyses have also confirmed the declining of the abundance of several sedentary bird species, and that is related to the fragmentation and the loss of their habitats by the anthropogenic activities

Keywords

conservation, distribution, fragmentation, occurrence, vegetation