Abstract
Climate change is among the most important global threats to biodiversity and mountain areas are supposed to be under especially high pressure. Although recent modelling studies suggest considerable future range contractions of montane species accompanied with increased extinction risk, data allowing to test actual population consequences of the observed climate changes and identifying traits associated to their adverse impacts are very scarce. To fill this knowledge gap, we estimated long-term population trends of montane birds from 1984 to 2011 in a central European mountain range, the Giant Mountains (Krkonoše), where significant warming occurred over this period. We then related the population trends to several species' traits related to the climate change effects. We found that the species breeding in various habitats at higher altitudes had more negative trends than species breeding at lower altitudes. We also found that the species moved upwards as a response to warming climate, and these altitudinal range shifts were associated with more positive population trends at lower altitudes than at higher altitudes. Moreover, long-distance migrants declined more than residents or species migrating for shorter distances. Taken together, these results indicate that the climate change, besides other possible environmental changes, already influences populations of montane birds with particularly adverse impacts on high-altitude species such as water pipit (Anthus spinoletta). It is evident that the alpine species, predicted to undergo serious climatically induced range contractions due to warming climate in the future, already started moving along this trajectory.
Highlights
Climate change ranks among the top drivers of biodiversity changes worldwide [1]
In the interspecific comparative analysis, the full model explained 28.53% of variability in long-term population trends of montane birds (F6,43 = 4.26, P = 0.002) and showed that the traits with the significant main effects were the mean altitude of the breeding occurrence and migration strategy, while the altitudinal range shift, life history strategy and European climatic niche were unrelated to the trends (Table 1)
Our study provides evidence for adverse impacts of current climate change on populations of high-altitude species, here exemplified by birds in the Giant Mts., a central European mountain range
Summary
Climate change ranks among the top drivers of biodiversity changes worldwide [1]. severity of its impacts varies over the Earth’s surface with mountain areas being among those under extraordinarily high pressure [2, 3]. Under the circumstances of climate change, montane species typically shift their ranges towards higher altitudes tracking their climatic optima [5,6,7,8], some other drivers might be involved in such shifts [9]. This pattern of shift was found in vast majority of cases because it is consistent with globally warming temperatures and a gradient of decreasing temperature with altitude [10]. Various studies modelled and predicted such threats for the future conditions [2, 12, 13], empirical evidence for these impacts of the current climate change on montane species remains limited due to the lack of long-term data on species’ distribution and abundance at high altitudes [14]
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