Abstract
Climate change affects the distribution and persistence of wildlife. Broad scale studies have demonstrated that climate change shifts the geographic ranges and phenology of species. These findings are influential for making high level strategies but not practical enough to guide site specific management. In this study, we explored the environment factors affecting the population of Bar-headed Goose in the key breeding site of Qinghai using generalized additive mixed model (GAMM). Our results showed that 1) there were significant increasing trends in climate variables and river flows to the Qinghai Lake; 2) NDVI in the sites decreased significantly despite the regional positive trend induced by the warmer and wetter climate; 3) NDVI at site scale was negatively correlated to lake water level; and 4) the abundance of Bar-headed Goose decreased significantly at all sites. While the abundance was positively related to NDVI at breeding sites, the GAMM revealed an opposite relationship at foraging areas. Our findings demonstrated the multi-facet effects of climate change on population dynamics; and the effect at global/regional scale could be complicated by site level factors.
Highlights
Clear evidences show that anthropogenic global warming has already affected biodiversity at individual, species, population, community, ecosystem and biome scales[1,2]
We modelled the spatial and temporal variations of Bar-headed Goose population dynamics (2007–2016) at the key breeding sites around the Qinghai Lake within the generalised additive mixed modelling framework (GAMM25)
We test the following hypotheses (Fig. 1) concerning the effects of climate change in Bar-headed goose population: 1) that the productivity benefits of global warming at regional scale[26] is offset by the detrimental impacts on site level hydrology through habitat loss and degradation; 2) due to distinct dispersal capacity and mobility[27], the relationship between bird abundance and environmental drivers at breeding sites may be divergent from foraging sites
Summary
Spatial and temporal distribution of Anser indicus. The bird survey data showed that the bar-headed geese used Dandao (S04) and Sankuaisi (S19) as the main breeding grounds and the other sites as foraging areas. There were considerable spatial and temporal (between year) variations for both breeding grounds and foraging areas (Supplementary Figure S1). For the monthly mean temperature, the increase was significant for each month, and the largest increase occurred in June and February (Table 1). Mean temperature was the only variables showed a monotonic increasing trend during the whole period the increasing was more rapid before 2010 (upper panel, Fig. 2). The long-term trend analysis indicated that there were three phases of changes in rainfall (lower panel, Fig. 2): there was little changes for 1995 to 2001; from 2002 to 2010, there was a rapid increase; and for the period of 2011–2015, there was little inter-annual change. The long-term trend analysis (upper panel, Fig. 3) showed that the river flow continuously increased till 2011, after which there were little inter-annual variations
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