Assessing taxonomic and functional change in British breeding bird assemblages over time

Abstract

Aim:The aim was to identify the primary drivers of compositional change in breeding bird assemblages over a 40-year period.Location: Britain.

Codistribution as an indicator of whole metacommunity response to environmental change

“…The fraction of observations listed only as only ‘ possible ’ confidence was higher in 2010, leading to a small decline in total occupancy in the stricter dataset that may have driven the reversal in the direction of change in spatial and environmental components. A reduction in the spatial partition (as we observed in the larger dataset) would be in line with the findings of Wayman et al . (2022) who found a moderate increase in spatial heterogeneity through time using similar data.…”

“…This filtering process left 80 species. The total number of observed records in our dataset in each year was remarkably consistent (1970 = 12950, 2010 = 12798), but there was high turnover in occupancy patterns over this period, both within and between species (Gillings et al 2019; Wayman et al . 2022).…”

Replacement drives native β‐diversity of British avifauna, while richness differences shape alien β‐diversity

“…We considered an alien species introduced breeders with self-sustaining populations. The status of species was retrieved by the British Trust for Ornithology's BirdFacts database (Robinson, 2005; https://www.bto.org/under stand ing-birds/ birdf acts), McInerny et al (2022) and Wayman et al (2022). For our analyses, we used hectads of mainland Britain with more than 50% terrestrial land cover for which environmental data were available (i.e.…”

“…Studies exploring the temporal β-diversity (i.e. changes of the species composition within hectad from one period to another) of birds have shown changes in species composition driven by turnover occurred between 1968-1972and 1988-1992(White et al, 2018), 1988-1992and 2008-2011(Tsianou et al, 2021), and 1968-1972and 2008-2011(Wayman et al, 2022.…”

Temporally robust occupancy frequency distributions in riverine metacommunities explained by local biodiversity regulation

“…A uniquely phenotypic explanation for the shape of the OFD would imply that species tend to occupy roughly consistent numbers of sites through time in the absence of strong environmental change. In fact, species’ site occupancy in contemporary England is extremely variable in time (Wayman et al 2022, and below). Hanski (1982) proposed a family of metapopulation models with fluctuating parameters that lead to fluctuations in site occupancy and distributions similar to those observed.…”