2025 Research in the Capitol
Presentation Type
Open Access Poster Presentation
Abstract
Data was collected on breeding grassland bird communities in northwest Iowan Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) fields. Within those fields, CRP grasslands in drought areas could be hayed or grazed for emergency management to harvest supplemental forage for livestock. We compared the bird communities in emergency hayed versus undisturbed grasslands to understand how the drought induced emergency haying affected the grassland birds. Using distance sampling, we found that significantly higher bird richness was found in undisturbed habitat areas compared to the emergency managed hayed areas in the same CRP parcel. In addition, we found that bird density in the emergency managed areas was marginally lower than in the undisturbed areas.
Start Date
31-3-2025 11:30 AM
End Date
31-3-2025 1:30 PM
Event Host
University Honors Programs, Iowa Regent Universities
Faculty Advisor
Ai Wen
Department
Department of Biology
Copyright
©2025 Claire Widmer, Ai Wen, Kenneth Elgersma, & Mark Vandever
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Widmer, Claire; Wen, Ai; Elgersma, Kenneth; and Vandever, Mark, "The Impact of Emergency Haying on Grassland Birds in the Conservation Reserve Program Habitats of Northwest Iowa" (2025). Research in the Capitol. 4.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/rcapitol/2025/all/4
The Impact of Emergency Haying on Grassland Birds in the Conservation Reserve Program Habitats of Northwest Iowa
Data was collected on breeding grassland bird communities in northwest Iowan Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) fields. Within those fields, CRP grasslands in drought areas could be hayed or grazed for emergency management to harvest supplemental forage for livestock. We compared the bird communities in emergency hayed versus undisturbed grasslands to understand how the drought induced emergency haying affected the grassland birds. Using distance sampling, we found that significantly higher bird richness was found in undisturbed habitat areas compared to the emergency managed hayed areas in the same CRP parcel. In addition, we found that bird density in the emergency managed areas was marginally lower than in the undisturbed areas.
