Large-Scale Changes in Community Composition: Determining Land Use and Climate Change Signals

Abstract

Human land use and climate change are regarded as the main driving forces of present-day and future species extinction. They may potentially lead to a profound reorganisation of the composition and structure of natural communities throughout the world. However, studies that explicitly investigate both forms of impact—land use and climate change—are uncommon. Here, we quantify community change of Dutch breeding bird communities over the past 25 years using time lag analysis. We evaluate the chronological sequence of the community temperature index (CTI) which reflects community response to temperature increase (increasing CTI indicates an increase in relative abundance of more southerly species), and the temporal trend of the community specialisation index (CSI) which reflects community response to land use change (declining CSI indicates an increase of generalist species). We show that the breeding bird fauna underwent distinct directional change accompanied by significant changes both in CTI and CSI which suggests a causal connection between climate and land use change and bird community change. The assemblages of particular breeding habitats neither changed at the same speed and nor were they equally affected by climate versus land use changes. In the rapidly changing farmland community, CTI and CSI both declined slightly. In contrast, CTI increased in the more slowly changing forest and heath communities, while CSI remained stable. Coastal assemblages experienced both an increase in CTI and a decline in CSI. Wetland birds experienced the fastest community change of all breeding habitat assemblages but neither CTI nor CSI showed a significant trend. Overall, our results suggest that the interaction between climate and land use changes differs between habitats, and that comparing trends in CSI and CTI may be useful in tracking the impact of each determinant.

Modest recovery of biodiversity in a western European country: The Living Planet Index for the Netherlands

“…For some species groups, like dragonflies, climate change is even considered to be one of the major drivers for their increase, in addition to improved water quality (Termaat et al, 2015). In the long run, it is deemed likely that climate change will threaten the persistence of species preferring a cool climate (Kampichler et al, 2012), but to date there is little evidence of a negative impact of climate change on biodiversity in the Netherlands.…”

When Common Birds Became Rare: Historical Records Shed Light on Long-Term Responses of Bird Communities to Global Change in the Largest Wetland of France

“…Indicators accounting for species-specific responses to land-use or temperature change were recently developed and applied at the European or national level to evaluate the response of bird communities over time [25–27]. …”

“…Simultaneously, with the general increase in temperatures, one should expect the relative abundance of hot-dwelling species in the community to increase over time. Although these indicators were successfully used with standardized monitoring[25–27], it is unclear whether they could be used to capture longer term changes in community composition using heterogeneous records of species occurrence. Overall, historical changes in community structure and composition are hardly documented or only for very local areas (most often in island landscapes) [28].…”

Uncertainty in thermal tolerances and climatic debt

“…It is however very different from distribution-based niche modelling methods as it reflects the realized changes in local composition of species assemblages in response to climate change predicatively. Besides, it was recently used successfully with several independent datasets to measure various aspects of biodiversity responses to climate changes for different groups [8], habitats [9] or scales [5].…”