Abstract
In this study, we evaluated the potential impact of climate change on the distributions of Turkey’s songbirds in the 21st century by modelling future distributions of 20 resident and nine migratory species under two global climate change scenarios. We combined verified data from an ornithological citizen science initiative (www.kusbank.org) with maximum entropy modeling and eight bioclimatic variables to estimate species distributions and projections for future time periods. Model predictions for resident and migratory species showed high variability, with some species projected to lose and others projected to gain suitable habitat. Our study helps improve the understanding of the current and potential future distributions of Turkey’s songbirds and their responses to climate change, highlights effective strategies to maximize avian conservation efforts in the study region, and provides a model for using citizen science data for biodiversity research in a large developing country with few professional field biologists. Our results demonstrate that climate change will not affect every species equally in Turkey. Expected range reductions in some breeding species will increase the risk of local extinction, whereas others are likely to expand their ranges.
Highlights
Large-scale anthropogenic climatic change has been documented since the mid-20th century and average global temperature has increased by 0.7uC over the past 100 years [1]
ROC plots predicted very similar area under the receiver operator curve (AUC) values between training and test data, even though the values for resident species were slightly lower for the test data (0.89)
The combined species richness maps for the resident and migratory species are given in Figure 1a and Figure 1b, respectively
Summary
Large-scale anthropogenic climatic change has been documented since the mid-20th century and average global temperature has increased by 0.7uC over the past 100 years [1]. Climate change has vital implications for biodiversity. It has an effect on a wide variety of organisms with diverse geographical distributions, affecting their physiology, distributions, phenology, and behavior. Climate change can render species’ ranges unsuitable and force populations to move from their current locations to new and unoccupied areas. During this transition, populations may become highly fragmented and local extinctions may occur [4,5], [8,9,10]. Species with limited climatic tolerance and specialized habitat requirements, limited dispersal abilities and thermal physiology are more likely to be affected this way [2,7,9]
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