Environmental factors determining the establishment of the African Long‐legged Buzzard Buteo rufinus cirtensis in Western Europe

Abstract

Winters have become warmer under the impact of climate change, which has modified the phenology as well as the distribution ranges of birds. The African Long‐legged Buzzard Buteo rufinus cirtensis has recently colonized Europe via the Strait of Gibraltar. We aim to explain the native distribution of this species and to predict favourable areas in newly colonized parts of Europe using geospatial modelling to identify the most influential factors in this process. We applied the favourability function, a generalized linear model describing environmental favourability, for the presence/absence of breeding areas in northern Morocco and the southern Iberian Peninsula, according to a set of variables describing climate, topography, human activity, vegetation and purely spatial trends. A model was built using some known breeding sites in northern Morocco, and was used to forecast future suitable breeding areas in Europe. A second model was built with the available data for northern Morocco and Europe to explain the current distribution of breeding sites. Both models were assessed according to discrimination, calibration and parsimony criteria, and the influence of each factor was analysed using variation partitioning. We conclude that the Iberian Peninsula could provide new suitable areas for the species and facilitate its northward expansion. This result, together with the increasing number of records available, suggests that this species could soon spread throughout Europe. Steady temperatures and abundant but seasonally distributed precipitation showed the strongest predictive power in the models. This indicates a close relationship between the species’ distribution and climate in the study area, and suggests that this species finds its most favourable environments in the Mediterranean biome. Topography and vegetation, specifically cliffs and woods near hunting zones, point to a fine‐scale habitat selection for breeding. As the case of the African Long‐legged Buzzard is not a unique event, our results may be useful to determine whether a northward expansion of the Mediterranean biome could be followed by distribution shifts of bird species that have so far been restricted to Africa.