The climatic drivers of long-term population changes in rainforest montane birds
de la Fuente, Alejandro, Navarro, Alejandro, and Williams, Stephen E. (2023) The climatic drivers of long-term population changes in rainforest montane birds. Global Change Biology, 29 (8). pp. 2132-2140.
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Abstract
Climate-driven biodiversity erosion is escalating at an alarming rate. The pressure imposed by climate change is exceptionally high in tropical ecosystems, where species adapted to narrow environmental ranges exhibit strong physiological constraints. Despite the observed detrimental effect of climate change on ecosystems at a global scale, our understanding of the extent to which multiple climatic drivers affect population dynamics is limited. Here, we disentangle the impact of different climatic stressors on 47 rainforest birds inhabiting the mountains of the Australian Wet Tropics using hierarchical population models. We estimate the effect of spatiotemporal changes in temperature, precipitation, heatwaves, droughts and cyclones on the population dynamics of rainforest birds between 2000 and 2016. We find a strong effect of warming and changes in rainfall patterns across the elevational-segregated bird communities, with lowland populations benefiting from increasing temperature and precipitation, while upland species show an inverse strong negative response to the same drivers. Additionally, we find a negative effect of heatwaves on lowland populations, a pattern associated with the observed distribution of these extreme events across elevations. In contrast, cyclones and droughts have a marginal effect on spatiotemporal changes in rainforest bird communities, suggesting a species-specific response unrelated to the elevational gradient. This study demonstrated the importance of unravelling the drivers of climate change impacts on population changes, providing significant insight into the mechanisms accelerating climate-induced biodiversity degradation.
| Item ID: | 78346 |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1365-2486 |
| Keywords: | Australian Wet Tropics, climate change, elevational shift, escalator to extinction, hierarchical models, population dynamics, rainforest birds, tropical rainforest |
| Copyright Information: | © 2023 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. |
| Research Data: | https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.hx3ffbgjj |
| Date Deposited: | 11 Oct 2023 00:29 |
| FoR Codes: | 41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4101 Climate change impacts and adaptation > 410102 Ecological impacts of climate change and ecological adaptation @ 70% 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310308 Terrestrial ecology @ 30% |
| SEO Codes: | 19 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY, CLIMATE CHANGE AND NATURAL HAZARDS > 1901 Adaptation to climate change > 190102 Ecosystem adaptation to climate change @ 100% |
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