Climate change is expected to restructure forest frugivorous bird communities in a biodiversity hot‐point within the Atlantic Forest

Abstract

Aim: Changes in climatic conditions are predicted to impact species distribution and hence alter their diversity patterns. Modifications in the composition of biological communities are expected as a result of the loss and replacement of species due to global warming. Forest frugivorous birds already suffer from habitat loss and may disappear locally due to suitable area contraction or range shifts to novel areas, disrupting seed dispersal and consequently the functioning of natural ecosystems. Here, we investigate the impacts of different climate scenarios on alpha and beta diversities of forest frugivorous birds.Location: Central Corridor of the Atlantic Forest (CCAF), Brazil. Methods:We used ecological niche models to project species distribution of 68 frugivorous birds for the baseline and future (2050 and 2070) scenarios. We generated binary maps of suitable areas for each species by climate scenario to calculate alpha and beta diversities.Results: Most forest frugivorous birds were projected to lose suitable area, as a consequence of climate change, reducing alpha diversity in future scenarios and increasing temporal beta diversity, which is dominated by the nestedness component. In addition, species richness decreased from the east to the west portion of the CCAF, while differentiation of bird communities increased in the same direction, a pattern consistent across all climate scenarios evaluated.Main conclusions: Climate change may exert drastic alterations in the composition of frugivorous bird communities in the CCAF. As forest frugivorous birds are critical to seed dispersal of forest plant species, impoverishment of their communities can drastically affect forest regeneration, diversity, and structure in the decades to come. Therefore, a better comprehension of spatio-temporal changes in diversity patterns of frugivorous birds can help us to avoid the disruption of seed dispersal and its consequences, such as cascading effects that will trigger biodiversity loss in the CCAF.

New progress in exploring the mechanisms underlying extraordinarily high biodiversity in global hotspots and their implications for conservation

“…Both, past evidence and future predictions unambiguously showed how fragile biodiversity is (Mota et al, 2022;Penjor et al, 2022;Su et al, 2022). There is evidence that current protection networks are insufficient to protect the hotspots (Leclerc et al, 2022).…”

“…Mota et al (2022) studied the impact of climate changes on alpha and beta diversity of forest frugivorous birds in Central Corridor of Atlantic Forest (CCAF), Brazil. Using ecological niche modelling most bird species were projected to lose suitable area by 2070 as a consequence of climate change, resulting in a decline of alpha diversity and an increase of temporal beta diversity, which is dominated by the nestedness component.…”

Climate change affects Galliformes taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity indexes, shifting conservation priority areas in China

“…We summed the presence probabilities of the 47 species under each scenario to illustrate the spatial distribution patterns of Galliformes in China. Then, given that a high proportion of presence records were sourced from citizen science datasets, which often suffer from biases and errors in species identification and spatial positioning (Bird et al, 2014), we used the 10‐percentile threshold (i.e., the minimum training presence probability that omitted 10% of presence records with the lowest probabilities) to transform output grids for each species as binary distribution maps, minimizing potential uncertainties and inaccuracies (Mota et al, 2022; Xu et al, 2020).…”

Observed and projected functional reorganization of riverine fish assemblages from global change

“…A more synoptic understanding of global change impacts on ecological communities will also require modeled biodiversity responses in unsurveyed locations or under anticipated future conditions (hereafter, “predictive analyses”). For example, predictive analyses have projected future range shifts in marine (Hattab et al, 2014; Lenoir et al, 2011) and freshwater (Bond et al, 2011; Herrera‐R et al, 2020) fishes, mammals (Freeman et al, 2019; Pandey & Papeş, 2018), and birds (Bender et al, 2019; Jetz et al, 2007; Mota et al, 2022; Papeş, 2007).…”