Influence of land cover features on avian community and potential conservation priority areas for biodiversity at a Ramsar site in India

Ecological Processes

Table 3 Principal components (PC) loadings (correlation coefficients) obtained from principal component analysis (with varimax rotation) on landscape-scale land cover variables. (PC1 is correlated to wetland area, PC2 is correlated to emergent vegetation area, and PC3 is correlated to agricultural field area)

Landscape-scale land cover variables	Principal components
Landscape-scale land cover variables	PC1	PC2	PC3
Wetlands	0.51*	− 0.25	0.30
Emergent vegetation	0.2	0.54*	− 0.26
Agricultural field	− 0.09	0.13	0.72*
Tree cover	− 0.35	0.37	0.45
Human habitation	0.3	0.39	− 0.19
Barren lands	0.2	− 0.54	0.06
Dikes and banks	− 0.63	− 0.21	− 0.3
Fallow lands	0.2	− 0.1	− 0.3
Variance explained	40%	29%	14%
Cumulative variance	40%	69%	83%

Bold fonts with ‘*’ marked are the highest component loadings and values > 0.5 are used to explain the PC