Scavenging Birds and Ecosystem Services Experience from Germany
Scavengers play an important role in ecosystems.Their obvious service for public health is well known at least in developing countries:In terms of ecosystem services they remove rotten meat and bones and in doing so prevent serious diseases in people and livestock.Vulture decline and its negative effect on economy,public health and culture has well been studied in the case of India.One major effect was that rabies spread as carrion was no longer consumed by birds but by mammals.So there is good evidence on the importance of vultures as scavengers.However,vultures are mainly extinct in industrial countries like Germany or China after prosecution and lack of food.Extinction of vultures occurred at least 200 years ago.Rabies was a major risk to public health in Germany until the disease was eradicated by vaccinating foxes.Without competition by vultures and without rabies causing death among foxes,their population increased tremendously and foxes are now regarded as a threat for ground breeding birds.Whereas Germany interferes in the carrion food web again by vaccinating foxes and causing more negative effect,India sees to eradicate the reasons for vulture decline such as banning the use of Diclophenac in animal husbandry.In the NECROS project of BTU Cottbus (Germany) the fragmented remaining food web based on carcasses is studied.Road kills of game,mainly roe deer and wild boar,are deposited in a nature reserve to carry out field experiments.Carcasses are monitored by automatic cameras.One of the main research aims is to find out what happens to the carrion food web with only some vertebrate scavengers around and no vultures at all.Results show that compared to complete ecosystems with large predators and vultures,the rudimentary food web based on carrion in Germany cannot provide the desirable ecosystem services.
Ecosystem services scavenging birds carcasses vultures
Xiaoying Gu Rene Krawczynski
Chair General Ecology,Brandenburg Technical University Cottbus,Germany
国际会议
Conference on Environmental Pollution and Public Health (2012年环境污染与大众健康学术会议(CEPPH2012))
上海
英文
647-649
2012-08-09（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）