Trait‐based indicators of bird species sensitivity to habitat loss are effective within but not across data sets

Abstract

Abstract. Species' traits have been widely championed as the key to predicting which species are most threatened by habitat loss, yet previous work has failed to detect trends that are consistent enough to guide large-scale conservation and management. Here we explore whether traits and environmental variables predict species sensitivity to habitat loss across two data sets generated by independent avifaunal studies in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil, both of which detected a similar assemblage of species, and similar species-specific responses to habitat change, across an overlapping sample of sites. Specifically, we tested whether 25 distributional, climatic, ecological, behavioral, and morphological variables predict sensitivity to habitat loss among 196 bird species, both within and across studies, and when data were analysed as occurrence or abundance. We found that four to nine variables showed high explanatory power within a single study or data set, but none performed as strong predictors across all data sets. Our results demonstrate that the use of species traits to predict sensitivity to anthropogenic habitat loss can produce predictions that are species-and site-specific and not scalable to whole regions or biomes, and thus should be used with caution.

Reptile responses to anthropogenic habitat modification: A global meta‐analysis

“…Overall, our results suggest that most of the traits we tested do not predict squamate responses to habitat modification. This aligns with other studies finding that traits are poor predictors of broad‐scale responses of other taxa to habitat loss or modification (Bartomeus, Cariveau, Harrison, & Winfree, 2018; Hatfield, Orme, Tobias, & Banks‐Leite, 2018). There are multiple reasons why this might be.…”

Global changes threaten functional and taxonomic diversity of insular species worldwide

“…Nevertheless, the choice of species pool (global vs. biogeographical) used for the null models influences the modalities of species traits identified as significantly associated with a threat, because of differences in the number and variability of FEs at a global and realm scale. This result demands further investigations into the biogeographical distribution of functional diversity from the local to the realm scale, with the aim to take into account the non‐random spatial distribution of threats and biodiversity (Hatfield, Orme, Tobias, & Banks‐Leite, ). Indeed, the different threats affect portions of land in non‐random spatial ways and interact with the distribution of biodiversity, which is spatially structured (Evans et al, ).…”

Measuring avian specialization

“…Using a diverse set of traits permits a better description of each dimension characterizing the species, as well as the overall level of specialism. This is also important for conservation since different sets of traits can help identify a broader range of species' vulnerabilities, and hence which species might be most sensitive to which anthropogenic threats (Allan et al, ; Hatfield, Orme, Tobias, & Banks‐Leite, ; Henle, Davies, Kleyer, Margules, & Settele, ).…”