Big Muddy Speaker Series presents:

The migratory corridor formed by the Mississippi River, its tributaries and other lakes and wetlands connected to them is called the Mississippi Flyway. Habitat along that path is REALLY important to birds moving through.

Development along our rivers in our urban areas creates little pockets, or islands, of habitat tucked in between pockets of development. The connectivity between these habitat islands begins to fragment.

UMSL PhD candidate J. Devonshire will share the results of a study she completed in 2011 with a team of researchers at the University of Missouri - St. Louis. They looked at the diversity and richness of birds in several restored and remnant parks in the Greater St. Louis Area. The data reflects the overwhelming importance of urban parks to birds along the Mississippi Flyway.

The Mississippi and Atlantic Migratory Bird Flyways.

According to Devonshire: "The best predictors of resident bird (i.e., breeding and wintering) species richness was park area and external developed area within 5 km, a surrogate for isolation. We suspect that the high species richness in parks in heavily urbanized areas is explained by the parks’ relatively large size and the funneling of species to two large parks within the most urbanized areas of St. Louis."

"For migratory species, the best predictors were habitat diversity and developed area within the park. As development continues to transform natural habitat along important avian migratory flyways, urban planning that includes large, diverse natural areas within urbanized landscapes is key to conserving local and migratory avifauna diversity."