BRYAN, R.*; CLARK, M. W.; Univ. of Florida; Univ. of Florida: Wetlands birds survey: A comparison of conventional stormwater basins, enhanced stormwater basins, and natural wetlands

The purpose of this investigation is to quantify the occurrence of wildlife in enhanced stormwater basins. We surveyed bird visits to the Stormwater Ecological Enhancement Project and other enhanced stormwater basins, compared to bird visits to conventional stormwater basins and natural wetlands in the area. The objectives were to quantify the occurrence of wildlife in enhanced stormwater basins; to create a continuum of the wildlife occurrences, translating to wildlife benefits in conventional retention areas, enhanced retention areas, and natural wetlands; and to place SEEP in the continuum of importance to wildlife. The enhanced basins could not be placed in a continuum between conventional and natural basins with the results of the species similarity index. Additionally, no obvious correlation with number of birds spotted was observed by the overall site index computed based on existence of habitat type variety at the site; therefore the birds were probably drawn to the sites for some other factor not captured by these statistics of relative habitat structure. Ultimately, these findings were not very supportive of our hypotheses and hopes for our �enhanced� basins, for reasons that we include to be the surroundings of the sites were not homogeneous and positive and negative influences were not controlled for, the visibility in a basin of enhanced structure would be lower than the clear view across an open conventional retention basin, the definition of some birds as �trash birds� and the deletion of these may lower some of the conventional numbers, and the productivity of the wetland could be the main attractant for birds.