Abstract
The spatial variation in the strength of climate change may lead to different impacts on migratory birds using different breeding areas across a region. We used a long-term data series of White Stork ring recoveries to study the temporal and spatial variation of annual survival rates of White Stork across western Europe between 1960 and 2009 in relation to climatic and environmental conditions at their breeding and wintering grounds. White Stork survival was estimated from the Cormack–Jolly–Seber (CJS) model using a cohort-based analysis. Our results support that climate change has caused a gradual decline in the survival performance of western European White Storks during the study period. Both the shape and the strength of the relationship between climate warming and survival differ among different life-stages of the individual development, with juvenile White Storks more strongly affected. The decline in survival is particularly marked for those storks breeding in southern Europe. The large-scale effect of climatic conditions identified in this widespread long-distance migrant species represents a highly likely scenario for other migratory birds in Europe.
Highlights
Supporting previous findings, our models showed that survival rates of long-lived, long-distance migratory findings, our models showed that survival rates of long-lived, long-distance migratory species could be strongly constrained by recent climatic changes, in their breeding species could be strongly constrained by recent climatic changes, bothboth in their breeding as as well as in their wintering grounds
Germany and Poland located at a similar latitude, we found that the environmental and climatic conditions in the breeding grounds in western Europe differed across a latitudinal gradient, leading to an asynchrony in the annual survival rates of White Storks ringed at different latitudinal locations
Our results showed that breeding sites with positive trends in normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) in spring exhibited higher survival rates in all White Stork age classes
Summary
Disturbances are events that can disrupt living organisms at any ecological level [1]. In this sense, human-driven climate change over the last years [2] is resulting in significant impacts on wild species around the world and has been considered a long-term threat for many of them [3,4]. Climate change and severe weather, defined as long-term climatic changes that may be linked to global warming and other severe climatic or weather events outside the natural range of variation that could wipe out a vulnerable species or habitat, are classified as first-level direct threats to biodiversity [5,6].
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