Using change trajectories to study the impacts of multi-annual habitat loss on fledgling production in an old forest specialist bird

2017

The loss and subdivision of habitat into smaller and more spatially isolated units due to human actions has been shown to adversely affect species worldwide. We examined how changes in old forest cover during eight years were associated with the cumulative number of fledged offspring at the end of study period in Eurasian treecreepers (Certhia familiaris) in Central Finland. We were specifically interested in whether the initial level of old forest cover moderated this relation. We applied a flexible and powerful approach, latent growth curve modelling in a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework, to create trajectories describing changes in old forest cover through time, and studied h…