Ecological barriers mediate spatiotemporal shifts of bird communities

Abstract

Species’ range shifts and local extinctions caused by global change lead to community composition changes. At large spatial scales, ecological barriers, such as biome boundaries, coastlines, elevation, and temperature gradients, can influence a community's ability to shift. Yet, ecological barriers are rarely considered in global change studies, potentially hindering predictions of biodiversity shifts. We used data from two consecutive European breeding bird atlases to calculate the geographic distance and direction between communities in the 1980's and their nearest compositional equivalent in the 2010’s and modelled their response to barriers. The ecological barriers affected both the distance and direction of bird community composition shifts, with coasts and elevation having the strongest influence. Combining ecological barriers and community shift projections can identify ecological corridors that facilitate shifts of species and communities under global change.

Evaluating temporal turnover in avian species richness in a Mediterranean semiarid region: Different responses to elevation and forest cover

“…This result supports the argument that biodiversity changes have a complex coupling with species richness trends (Hillebrand et al., 2018), which may instead be influenced by different global change drivers. Moreover, range shift of avian community in a regional spatial scale may also suffer the effects of landscape fragmentation and landscape barriers that decrease the species movements (Marjakangas et al., 2023).…”

“…Only a handful of studies have been able to evaluate or compare historical data with modern data over a long time interval (e.g. Daskalova et al, 2020;Freeman et al, 2018;Marjakangas et al, 2023;Moritz et al, 2008;Palacio et al, 2020).…”

“…natural revegetation) in agricultural areas may generate range shifts in species associated with agroecosystems, which are suffering from widespread declines at the European level (Eglington & Pearce‐Higgins, 2012; Gaüzère et al., 2020; Reino et al., 2018). On the other hand, deforestation has caused habitat loss and fragmentation for forest species (Laurance et al., 2000), which may generate a landscape barrier for range shift of communities affected by climate change (Marjakangas et al., 2023). Therefore, the study of the range shifts of animal species in forest areas undergoing landscape transformations (agricultural abandonment vs. deforestation) and located along elevational gradients may fill a priority knowledge gap.…”

“…Only a handful of studies have been able to evaluate or compare historical data with modern data over a long time interval (e.g. Daskalova et al., 2020; Freeman et al., 2018; Marjakangas et al., 2023; Moritz et al., 2008; Palacio et al., 2020). Such studies are particularly valuable since they provide ‘hard’ information about the temporal trajectories of ecosystems rather than probabilistic forecasts only, and allow actually testing for the presence of trends as well as investigating causal hypotheses about the mechanisms underlying the observed changes (Cheng et al., 2019).…”

Disentangling the complexity of climate change and land‐management effects on wildlife communities

“…However, such climate‐driven latitudinal shifts are often mediated, hindered or facilitated, by other forces. Such forces materialize at different scales, from regional to continental level, such as ecological barriers (Marjakangas et al ., 2023), to local scale, such as land‐use and habitat management (e.g. Thomas & Gillingham, 2015).…”