Temporal dynamics of bird community composition: an analysis of baseline conditions from long-term data

Abstract

Numerous anthropogenic activities threaten the biodiversity on earth. Because all ecological communities constantly experience temporal turnover due to natural processes, it is important to distinguish between change due to anthropogenic impact and the underlying natural rate of change. In this study, we used data sets on breeding bird communities that covered at least 20 consecutive years, from a variety of terrestrial ecosystems, to address two main questions: (1) How fast does the composition of bird communities change over time and can we identify a baseline of natural change that distinguishes primeval systems from systems experiencing varying degree of human impact? (2) How do patterns of temporal variation in composition vary among bird communities in ecosystems with different anthropogenic impact? Time lag analysis (TLA) showed a pattern of increasing rate of temporal compositional change from largescale primeval systems to disturbed and protected systems to distinctly successional systems. TLA slopes of <0.04 were typical for breeding bird communities with natural turnover, while communities subjected to anthropogenic impact were characterised by TLA slopes of >0.04. Most of the temporal variability of breeding bird communities was explained by slow changes occurring over decades, regardless of the intensity of human impact. In most of the time series, medium and shortwave periodicity was not detected, with the exception of breeding bird communities subjected to periodic pulses (e.g. caterpillar outbreaks causing food resource peaks).

Species reordering, not changes in richness, drives long‐term dynamics in grassland communities

“…) or slow temporal changes occurring over decades (Kampichler et al . ). Grasshoppers, which include C 3 and C 4 specialists (Engel et al .…”

The more things change: species losses detected in Phoenix despite stability in bird–socioeconomic relationships

“…The majority of community composition studies are of short duration (1-2 yr; Marzluff et al 2001, Kampichler et al 2014, but a growing body of longitudinal studies of urban biotic communities is emerging. A recent review found 34 studies of urban birds that encompass five or more years of sampling (Fidino and Magle 2017).…”

Multifaceted aspects of synchrony between freshwater prokaryotes and protists

“…Similar to a RDA, the first canonical AEM axis represents the dominant pattern in the data and the second AEM axis the next most important pattern. In essence, AEM modelling facilitates the identification of different temporal scales (i.e., from seasonal, to decadal to millennial scales) in complex time series data (Baho, Futter, Johnson, & Angeler, ) and has been widely applied to different ecosystems and taxa (invertebrates: Angeler, Allen, & Johnson, ; birds: Kampichler et al, ; paleolimnology: Spanbauer et al, ; microscopy‐based phytoplankton: Angeler, Allen, & Johnson, ; insects: Blanchet et al, ), well supporting its explanatory power. The fitted site scores (i.e., linear combination of explanatory variables; lc scores) of the first and second canonical AEM axis were plotted along time to identify the temporal variability of communities at different temporal scales.…”