A Landscape Approach to Preserving Farm Ponds for Wintering Bird Refuges in Taoyuan, Taiwan1

Man-made farm ponds are unique geographic features of the Taoyuan Tableland, Taiwan. Besides irrigation, they provide refuges for wintering birds. The issue at hand is that these features are disappearing and bring with it the loss of this refuge function. It is ecologically significant because one fifth of all the bird species in Taiwan find home on these ponds. A holistic model was developed by incorporating logistic regression with error back-propagation (BP) into the paradigm of artificial neural networks (ANN). This study aims at characterizing the diversity of bird species associated with these ponds whose likelihood of survival was assessed along the gradient of land development intensities. Such characterization helps establish decision criteria needed for designating certain ponds for habitat preservation and developing their protection strategies