Range shifts of many species are now documented as a response to global warming. But whether these observed changes are occurring fast enough remains uncertain and hardly quantifiable. Here, we developed a simple framework to measure change in community composition in response to climate warming. This framework is based on a community temperature index (CTI ) that directly reflects, for a given species assemblage, the balance between low-and high-temperature dwelling species. Using data from the French breeding bird survey, we first found a strong increase in CTI over the last two decades revealing that birds are rapidly tracking climate warming. This increase corresponds to a 91 km northward shift in bird community composition, which is much higher than previous estimates based on changes in species range edges. During the same period, temperature increase corresponds to a 273 km northward shift in temperature. Change in community composition was thus insufficient to keep up with temperature increase: birds are lagging approximately 182 km behind climate warming. Our method is applicable to any taxa with large-scale survey data, using either abundance or occurrence data. This approach can be further used to test whether different delays are found across groups or in different land-use contexts.

Each species generally has a close relationship with one or more habitats and can therefore be classified as either specialist or generalist. We studied whether specialist and generalist species are spatially distributed independently of each other. Repeating the analysis for 100 of the most frequent terrestrial bird species recorded over the 10 000 sampled sites of the French Breeding Bird survey, we found that specialists were more abundant if the rest of the community was specialized, and that the inverse was also true. This pattern was far subtler than just a simple dichotomy: most species actually presented a maximum abundance at a value of community specialization similar to their own level of specialization. Bird communities appear very well defined along a specialist-generalist gradient. We believe this pattern becomes more apparent with habitat degradation. The consequences on both ecological services and community resilience may well be considerable.

Aim Worldwide, functional homogenization is now considered to be one of the most prominent forms of biotic impoverishment induced by current global changes. Yet this process has hardly been quantified on a large scale through simple indices, and the connection between landscape disturbance and functional homogenization has hardly been established. Here we test whether changes in land use and landscape fragmentation are associated with functional homogenization of bird communities at a national scale. Location France.Methods We estimated functional homogenization of a community as the average specialization of the species present in that community. We studied the spatial variation of this community specialization index (CSI) using 1028 replicates from the French Breeding Bird Survey along spatial gradients of landscape fragmentation and recent landscape disturbance, measured independently, and accounting for spatial autocorrelation. ResultsThe CSI was very sensitive to both measures of environmental degradation: on average, 23% of the difference in the CSI values between two sample sites was attributed to the difference in fragmentation and the disturbance between sites. This negative correlation between CSI and sources of landscape degradation was consistent over various habitats and biogeographical zones. Main conclusionsWe demonstrate that the functional homogenization of bird communities is strongly positively correlated to landscape disturbance and fragmentation. We suggest that the CSI is particularly effective for measuring functional homogenization on both local and global scales for any sort of organism and with abundance or presence-absence data.