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A. Gil-Tena et al. 2010. Disentangling recent changes in forest bird ranges in Mediterranean forests (NE Spain)
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forest structure due to management did not appear to have any influence. The weak positive
influence of burnt forest area may indicate that species richness varied despite fires.
4. Discussion
Although the unexplained variation of the models may evidence that other factors not
considered here affected forest bird range changes at the study scale or others, our results
demonstrated that the general positive variation of forest bird species richness (Figure 1) was
significant in forested areas with a developed structure that matured during the 20 last years of
the 20th century. Afforestation was also shown as potentially influence species variation. These
results agree with previous studies at the same scale and area (Gil-Tena et al. 2009, 2010) which
showed that forest maturation and afforestation, mainly due to land abandonment, have favored
ranges of many forest birds and overridden the potentially negative effects of fires. Nevertheless,
we cannot discount different levels of impact of forest fires on forest birds at smaller scales
(