Universities as Conservation Sites for Woodpecker Species in the Southeastern US

There are many threats that contribute to the decline of bird populations including climate change, deforestation, urbanization, invasive species, habitat loss and fragmentation, hunting, and pollution (Loss et al. 2012; Sih et al. 2011). Rosenburg (2019) stated that a wide-spread loss of over a billion breeding individuals has occurred in the last half-century and the loss occurred across a wide range of species and habitats. Long term surveys that record the fluctuation of bird species numbers indicated that the net loss in total abundance is 2.9 billion birds across almost all biomes (Rosenburg et al. 2019). Other long-term surveys have shown 303 out of 529 bird species have experienced a population decline (Rosenburg et al. 2019). Birds that live in forest biomes experienced a larger loss with a cumulative reduction of more than 1 billion birds (Rosenburg et al. 2019). Birds are important to the ecosystem due to the roles they have within it. By using birds as indicator species, we can understand the health of the ecosystem (Northrup et al. 2019)