Migratory strategy drives species-level variation in bird sensitivity to vegetation green-up

Youngflesh, Casey; Socolar, Jacob B.; Amaral, Bruna Rodrigues do; Arab, Ali; Guralnick, Robert; Hurlbert, Allen H.; LaFrance, Raphael; Mayor, Stephen J.; Miller, David A. W.; Tingley, Morgan W.

doi:10.1038/s41559-021-01442-y

Cited by 59 publications

(99 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…Despite repeated calls, the combined effects of multiple global change drivers on species' distributions remain under-investigated, serving as a major impediment to accurate projections of biodiversity and effective multispecies conservation (Braunisch et al, 2014;Hockey et al, 2011;Titeux et al, 2016). Looking forward, our findings suggest that climate change may influence future distributional boundaries for many bird species overwintering in the eastern United States (Bateman et al, 2020), with implications for migratory strategies, phenology, and population dynamics (Socolar et al, 2017;Youngflesh et al, 2021). We also present evidence for the pivotal role of LULC change in driving distributional dynamics of bird species with limited and declining habitat availability, indicating that effective land management will be critical for improving these species' resilience to climate change, especially during the winter season of limited food resources and energy-intensive weather conditions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Unraveling a century of global change impacts on winter bird distributions in the eastern United States

Saunders

Meehan

Michel

et al. 2022

Global Change Biology

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One of the most pressing questions in ecology and conservation centers on disentangling the relative impacts of concurrent global change drivers, climate and land-use/ land-cover (LULC), on biodiversity. Yet studies that evaluate the effects of both drivers on species' winter distributions remain scarce, hampering our ability to develop full-annual-cycle conservation strategies. Additionally, understanding how groups of species differentially respond to climate versus LULC change is vital for efforts to enhance bird community resilience to future environmental change. We analyzed long-term changes in winter occurrence of 89 species across nine bird groups over a 90-year period within the eastern United States using Audubon Christmas Bird Count (CBC) data. We estimated variation in occurrence probability of each group as a function of spatial and temporal variation in winter climate (minimum temperature, cumulative precipitation) and LULC (proportion of group-specific and anthropogenic habitats within CBC circle). We reveal that spatial variation in bird occurrence probability was consistently explained by climate across all nine species groups. Conversely, LULC change explained more than twice the temporal variation (i.e., decadal changes) in bird occurrence probability than climate change on average across groups. This pattern was largely driven by habitat-constrained species (e.g., grassland birds, waterbirds), whereas decadal changes in occurrence probabilities of habitat-unconstrained species (e.g., forest passerines, mixed habitat birds) were equally explained by both climate and LULC changes over the last century. We conclude that climate has generally governed the winter occurrence of avifauna in space and time, while LULC change has played a pivotal role in driving distributional dynamics of species with limited and declining habitat availability. Effective land management will be critical for improving species' resilience to climate change, especially during a season of relative resource scarcity and critical energetic trade-offs.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Unraveling a century of global change impacts on winter bird distributions in the eastern United States

Saunders

Meehan

Michel

et al. 2022

Global Change Biology

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“…In this case of introduced or invasive species, categorizing species as “generalists/specialists”, becomes far less relevant, as species transplanted to a new geographic area do not necessarily fit either category. However, future studies of community composition might benefit from incorporating other descriptors such as species sensitivities to environmental variables (Youngflesh et al, 2021), which can be equally applied across species at the community level. For the most part, invasive species appeared infrequently in this study and were of very little consequence to the results (see Appendix S2).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating compositional changes in the avian communities of eastern North America using temperature and precipitation indices

Curley

Manne

Ramírez‐Garofalo

et al. 2022

Journal of Biogeography

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Aim: Species distributions are altered by climate change, resulting in changes in community composition. How communities are changing with climate is important for understanding the dynamics of changing diversity patterns. In this study, we employ two community weighted means (CWMs) of temperature (CTI) and precipitation (CPI) to evaluate patterns in climate-driven community changes.Location: Eastern North America between −100° and −60° longitude and 25°-50°N latitude. Taxon: North American birdsMethods: We used North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) data from 1990 to 2018 to test the spatiotemporal trends of these indices at a sub-continental (across all BBS routes) and at a regional scale (sub-continental scale partitioned by 5° latitude bands). We employ a jackknife analysis to highlight individual species contributions to CTI and CPI trends and further identify group characteristics of species based on relative abundance trends and range expansion and contraction trends.Results: Across all BBS routes, temperature marginally increased and precipitation significantly increased. At the sub-continental scale, we found no correlation between CTI and temperature, but a positive correlation between CPI and precipitation. CTI and CPI both increased, driven by increased abundances of "warm" and "wet" dwelling species expanding in range. Regional scale CTI and CPI patterns deviated from sub-continental patterns. CTI was driven by "warm" dwelling species increasing in abundance and expanding in range, whereas decreases in "dry" dwelling species contracting in range drove CPI trends at the highest latitudes. Main conclusions:The concurrent use of CTI and CPI highlights that community dynamics are more complicated than using temperature metrics alone. Employing more than one community index demonstrates how simultaneous increases in two separate evaluative indices can have disproportionate effects on the number of species that contribute to a trend and highlight disparate mechanisms that contribute to these underlying differences.

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“…Characterizing the interplay between these various factors, operating over space and time, is key to understanding how morphology is likely to change into the future, in response to continued abiotic environmental change. Although the ecological consequences of morphological change and how morphology interacts with other climate change responses – including shifts in species’ ranges ( 47 ) and the timing of seasonal events ( 48 ) – are currently unknown ( 2 ), the importance of body size for life history traits ( 49 ), physiology ( 50 ), and both cross- ( 51 ) and intra-trophic ( 52 ) interactions, suggests the implications of these changes could be far reaching. Given projected changes in climatic conditions, continued morphological change and its associated consequences can be expected into the foreseeable future.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Abiotic conditions shape spatial and temporal morphological variation in North American birds

Youngflesh

Saracco

Siegel

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Abiotic environmental conditions play a key role in driving the size and shape of organisms. Quantifying environment-morphology relationships is important not only for understanding the fundamental processes driving phenotypic diversity within and among species, but also for predicting how species will respond to ongoing global change. Despite a clear set of expectations motivated by ecological theory, broad evidence in support of generalizable effects of abiotic conditions, such as temperature, on spatial and temporal intraspecific morphological variation has been limited. Using standardized data from over 250,000 captures of 105 landbird species, we assessed intraspecific shifts in bird morphology since 1989 while simultaneously measuring spatial morphological gradients across the North American continent. Across bird species, we found strong spatial and temporal trends in body size, with warmer temperatures associated with smaller body sizes both at more equatorial latitudes and in more recent years. The magnitude of these thermal effects varied both across and within species, with results suggesting it is the warmest, rather than the coldest, temperatures driving both spatial and temporal trends. Across elevation, we found that body size declines as relative wing length increases, likely due to the benefits that longer wings confer for flight in thin air environments. Our results provide support for both existing and new large-scale ecomorphological gradients and highlight how the response of functional tradeoffs to abiotic variation drives morphological change.

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Migratory strategy drives species-level variation in bird sensitivity to vegetation green-up

Cited by 59 publications

References 71 publications

Unraveling a century of global change impacts on winter bird distributions in the eastern United States

Unraveling a century of global change impacts on winter bird distributions in the eastern United States

Evaluating compositional changes in the avian communities of eastern North America using temperature and precipitation indices

Abiotic conditions shape spatial and temporal morphological variation in North American birds

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