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Abstract

Traditional agricultural style food plots, or wildlife openings, are widely used for wildlife management and hunting opportunities on public and private lands in the Southeastern United States. These habitats are often cited as beneficial for game and nongame wildlife, but there are few published studies examining nongame bird use of food plots in recent decades. Modern concerns about the ecological costs of food plots, particularly fragmentation and invasive non-native species, warrant a new examination of this practice. We conducted avian surveys during the breeding season of 2008 at 39 sites composed of three different treatments: traditional food plots, novel food plots enhanced with a shrubby edge, and unmanaged forest. We detected 39 bird species within 50 meters of our point counts. We used a Bayesian implementation of a single-season occupancy model to simultaneously estimate occupancy of each species and derive an estimate of species richness at the three different treatments. Our results suggest that fewer birds use traditional food plots compared to the novel food plot with a brushy edge or unmanaged forest. This difference appears to be due to an increased use by early successional species in novel food plots, probably because brushy edge habitat is not available in traditional food plots, and a decrease in forest interior species around novel and traditional food plots. To assess threats from invasive non-native species from food plots, we surveyed non-native plants in a subset of the plots in May 2011. Thirty-two non-native plant species were found in food plots compared to 1 in the brushy edge and no non-native species in the forest plots. Sixty-four percent of these non-native species were considered serious threats as invasive species. The spread of some of these non-native species from the food plots into the surrounding landscape beyond our vegetative surveys, particularly along roads, suggests food plots may play a role in introducing invasive non-native plants to the larger landscape.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Jim Wentworth, Tim Keyes and Bill Blackburn for their assistance in conducting bird surveys, also Lisa Kruse for her assistance reviewing plant identification and taxonomy.

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