Les parcs-nature de la ville de Montréal, des refuges de diversité aviaire?

Protected natural areas in urban landscapes are doom to play an increasing ecological role in the maintenance of biodiversity as urbanization is progressing. Since the early 1990’s the city of Montréal has acquired a network of 1447 ha of the last remaining natural areas on the island to create nature parks. An ecosystem-based management approach has been developed to ensure the ecological integrity and quality of nature parks ecosystems and biodiversity through several environmental monitoring programs of which a breeding birds monitoring plays a pivotal role since 1997. In this paper we report the results of the first 10 years of this program where breeding birds have been annually monitored with permanent point count stations. Over the 1997-2007 period, the species composition of bird communities in nature parks has remained relatively stable whereas the proportion of species from forest habitats, open habitats (marshes, wetlands, prairies and abandoned fields) and edges reflect the diversity of habitats unique to each park. These relatively stable patterns of bird community composition over this 10 years’ period emphasize the potential of this protected areas’ network to contribute to the maintenance of breeding bird populations on Montreal island. At the opposite, the persisting low occurrences of most species that are sensitive to forest fragmentation highlights the challenge faced by nature parks to fully play their ecological role has habitat refuges for these species. The relationship between increased natural habitats in the neighborhood surrounding nature parks and increasing occurrence of one of these sensitive species, the Ovenbird, suggests that nature parks could quickly increase their capacity to maintain sensitive species provided that urban planning reduces the human footprint with buffers in the neighboring environment. Data for the 2008-2018 period should allow a better assessment of the trends of the first 10-years of this insightful bird monitoring program.