Abstract
AbstractAimTo evaluate the patterns of bird assemblage and distribution in an endangered grassland system, taking into accounts both environmental and biotic effects. To further focus on an endangered songbird and associated steppe birds.LocationInner Mongolia, China.MethodsWe investigated the relative importance of abiotic and biotic factors driving the abundance and co‐occurrence of steppe birds in Inner Mongolia by using joint species distribution models. We examined the general patterns of species assemblage, with a focus on the endangered Jankowski's Bunting and other species potentially sharing the same niche or interacting with it, including potential competitors (especially the closely related Meadow Bunting), predators (corvids, raptors) and a parasite (cuckoo).ResultsThe studied steppe species exhibited varied responses to environmental variables, including climate, landscape and habitat predictors. We observed stronger species correlations due to residual covariates than to abiotic covariates. Jankowski's Bunting displayed strong positive co‐occurrences with other ground‐nesting songbirds and exhibited significant responses to all measured habitat and climate variables, indicating that this endangered bird has a high niche specialization and wide associations with other sympatric steppe bird species.Main conclusionOur results pointed out that climate, landscape and steppe habitat predictors are not the only factors structuring bird assemblages. Our results suggested that Jankowski's Bunting is an indicator of the occurrence of other species, especially open‐nesting specialized steppe songbirds, so it could act as a surrogate for overall steppe bird conservation. These findings are helpful for understanding how abiotic and biotic processes interactively alter bird communities and making effective management decisions to mitigate multiple threats to the entire community.
Highlights
Understanding ecological processes that drive species distribution and associations is a central question in ecology, evolution and conservation biology, especially for evaluating spatial protections for threatened species, tracking the spread of invasive species and interpreting the impacts of environmental change across species and communities (Thorson et al, 2016)
Among the outputs of correlated response model (CRM), we identified the relative importance of abiotic covariates for each species and constructed a horizontal line plot showing 95% highest posterior density (HPD) intervals for the column-specific regression coefficients by “ggboral” package
Fine-scale species distribution patterns result from processes linked to environmental filtering and biotic interactions (Sanín & Anderson, 2018)
Summary
Understanding ecological processes that drive species distribution and associations is a central question in ecology, evolution and conservation biology, especially for evaluating spatial protections for threatened species, tracking the spread of invasive species and interpreting the impacts of environmental change across species and communities (Thorson et al, 2016). The JSDMs have been widely applied to explore fish (Inoue et al, 2017), bird (Royan et al, 2016), butterfly (Ovaskainen, Roy, Fox, & Anderson, 2016b) and fungus communities (Abrego, Dunson, Halme, Salcedo, & Ovaskainen, 2017) in order to model the joint distribution or abundance of species in communities and further estimate the response of each co-occurring species to abiotic environmental factors. Within birds, those associated with grassland habitats are highly threatened (Traba & Morales, 2019). We wanted to test whether we could use the presence of Jankowski's Bunting as a surrogate of the abundance of other steppe birds for global conservation purpose
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