Abstract
Change of avian migratory behavior is one of the best-studied phenomena presumably associated with contemporary climate change, yet to what degree these behavioral changes represent responses to climate warming is still controversial. We investigated the inter-specific variation in change of migratory behavior over three decades at a Central-European site, testing whether the type and extent of such changes are predicted by the species’ responsiveness to short-term variation in large-scale climatic indices. We found that species with earlier arrivals after winters with higher North-Atlantic Oscillation indices were more likely to overwinter at the study site; this behavior was more frequent in the second than in the first half of the study, although the extent of this change was not predicted quantitatively by short-term climatic responsiveness. Overwintering was more prevalent in short-distance migrants with more complex diets and larger population sizes. Furthermore, species arriving earlier after summers with higher Sahel rainfall indices increasingly advanced their first arrival date, whereas species that do not molt in the pre-breeding season increased their frequency of overwintering in more recent years. Our results demonstrate that interspecific variation in short-term climatic responsiveness predicts long-term changes in migratory behaviors, supporting that the latter are responses to climate change. Furthermore, the type of response (advancing arrivals or overwintering near the breeding grounds) depends on life history. Finally, we found that overwintering behavior during the study period predicted subsequent trends in population size, suggesting that information on temporal changes in migratory strategy may help conservation planning and risk assessment.
Highlights
In parallel with global climatic changes, various alterations of physiology, distribution, and phenology in a wide range of species have been documented and interpreted as biological responses to climatic changes (Hughes, 2000; Walther et al, 2002; Parmesan and Yohe, 2003; Parmesan, 2006; Poloczanska et al, 2013; Thackeray et al, 2016)
We demonstrated that the behavioral changes of migratory birds comprised shifts to earlier arrival (FAD) as well as an increased frequency of overwintering in HNP over the recent decades
The 22 species in which overwintering occurred and typically increased in parallel with the contemporary climatic changes were those that matched their arrival dates better to year-to-year fluctuations of North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) values compared with the 85 species that remained migratory in HNP
Summary
In parallel with global climatic changes, various alterations of physiology, distribution, and phenology in a wide range of species have been documented and interpreted as biological responses to climatic changes (Hughes, 2000; Walther et al, 2002; Parmesan and Yohe, 2003; Parmesan, 2006; Poloczanska et al, 2013; Thackeray et al, 2016). An interesting aspect of these alterations is that they show large variation among species (Visser and Both, 2005; Møller et al, 2008; Végvári et al, 2010). Understanding the causes and consequences of this interspecific variation is crucial for several reasons. Changes in Avian Migratory Behaviors induced phenotypic change. Studying how these changes occur can shed light on the relative roles of phenotypic plasticity and genetic differentiation in adaptation (Van Buskirk et al, 2012; Urban et al, 2014). Climate-driven changes can be used to inform species-specific conservation planning, as phenotypic changes over recent decades have been shown to be an important predictor of population declines in a number of species of key conservation importance (Møller et al, 2008; Végvári and Barta, 2016)
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