What is it about?
In this Springer chapter, we explored why cuckoos are considered as prime candidates as bioindicators: Because they play a key role in interactions among many different categories of species such as other brood parasites, hosts, plant communities exploited by cuckoos and their hosts for food and the primary components of their diet such as large butterfly caterpillars that have become increasingly rare in agricultural habitats. Briefly, cuckoos are prime surrogates of avian biodiversity as reflected by different components of biodiversity, bioindicators of environmental quality, easy detectability and a clear association with climate change scenarios.
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Why is it important?
The use of simple and cost-effective surrogates of biodiversity can help on conservation and monitoring planning.
Perspectives
Cuckoos and their calls are known to everybody, and as such they are easy to identify, locate and map. These close associations among a diversity of taxa open the possibility that cuckoos may serve as tools in popularizing science, but also as prime targets of citizen science to assess biodiversity, to collect unprecedented amounts of information on bioindicators and to analyse spatial and temporal distributions of this biodiversity.
Professor Federico Morelli
Czech University of Life Sciences Prague
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cuckoos as Indicators of Biodiversity, January 2017, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-73138-4_10.
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