Abstract
ABSTRACT Phenological shifts of plants and animals due to climate change can vary among regions and species, requiring study of local ecosystems to understand specific impacts. The reproductive timing of insectivorous songbirds in temperate forests is tightly synchronized with peak prey abundance, and thus they can be susceptible to such shift in timing. We aimed to investigate the effect of future climate change on the egg-laying phenology of the Varied Tit (Sittiparus various), which is common and widely distributed in South Korean forests. We developed the predictive model by investigating their egg-laying dates in response to spring temperatures along geographical gradients, and our model indicated that the tits lay eggs earlier when the average of daily mean and daily maximum temperatures rise. We predicted future shifts in egg-laying dates based on the most recent climate change model published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), under a scenario with no climate change mitigation and under a scenario with moderate mitigation. Under this outcome, this species might be unable to adapt to rapid climate change due to asynchrony with prey species during the reproductive period. If no mitigation is undertaken, our model predicts that egg-laying dates will be advanced by more than 10 days compared to the present in 83.58% of South Korea. However, even moderate mitigation will arrest this phenomenon and maintain present egg-laying dates. These results demonstrate the first quantitative assessment for the effect of warming temperatures on the phenological response of insectivorous songbirds in South Korea.
Highlights
Anthropogenic climate change is one of the greatest threats to ecosystems across the globe, introducing a dramatic shift in thermal conditions that organisms and ecological communities have not experienced during their evolutionary history (Harrington et al 1999; Walther et al 2002; Parmesan and Yohe 2003)
The first best model indicated that the egg-laying dates advanced 2.42 days when mean temperatures increased by 1°C (Figure 2(a), Table 1), while the dates advanced 1.95 days as the maximum temperatures increased by 1°C in the second-best model (Figure 2(b), Table 1)
Our results indicate that egg-laying in Varied Tits will occur earlier when the average daily mean and max temperature prior to the breeding season increases, along geographical gradients
Summary
Anthropogenic climate change is one of the greatest threats to ecosystems across the globe, introducing a dramatic shift in thermal conditions that organisms and ecological communities have not experienced during their evolutionary history (Harrington et al 1999; Walther et al 2002; Parmesan and Yohe 2003). Phenological processes may be among the most sensitive to climate change (Badeck et al 2004; Edwards and Richardson 2004), with effects occurring at all trophic levels including plant flowering and growing, emergence of arthropods, and breeding of vertebrates (Visser et al 2006; Burgess et al 2018; Bell et al 2019). These shifts in phenology can negatively impact ecological services to local societies and functional interactions in ecosystems across the world (Price 2002; Stenseth and Mysterud 2002; Both et al 2006). Synchrony between songbird breeding and caterpillar biomass is strongly associated with songbird reproductive success (Naef-Daenzer and Keller 1999; Sanz et al 2003; Visser et al 2006)
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