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Winners and losers: How the elevational range of breeding birds on Alps has varied over the past four decades due to climate and habitat changes

Climate warming and habitat transformation are widely recognized as worrying threatening factors. Understanding the individual contribution of these two factors to the change of species distribution could be very important in order to effectively counteract the species range contraction, especially...

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Autores principales: Bani, Luciano, Luppi, Massimiliano, Rocchia, Emanuel, Dondina, Olivia, Orioli, Valerio
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374676/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30805160
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4838
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author Bani, Luciano
Luppi, Massimiliano
Rocchia, Emanuel
Dondina, Olivia
Orioli, Valerio
author_facet Bani, Luciano
Luppi, Massimiliano
Rocchia, Emanuel
Dondina, Olivia
Orioli, Valerio
author_sort Bani, Luciano
collection PubMed
description Climate warming and habitat transformation are widely recognized as worrying threatening factors. Understanding the individual contribution of these two factors to the change of species distribution could be very important in order to effectively counteract the species range contraction, especially in mountains, where alpine species are strongly limited in finding new areas to be colonized at higher elevations. We proposed a method to disentangle the effects of the two drivers of range change for breeding birds in Italian Alps, in the case of co‐occurring climate warming and shrub and forest encroachment. For each species, from 1982 to 2017, we related the estimated yearly elevational distribution of birds to the correspondent overall average of the daily minimum temperatures during the breeding season and the estimated amount of shrubs and forest cover. Using a hierarchical partitioning approach, we assessed the net contribution (i.e., without the shared effect) of each driver. Both temperature and shrub and forest cover showed a positive trend along the time series and resulted the most likely causes of the significant elevational displacement for 21 of the 29 investigated birds. While shrub and forest cover was found to be an important driver of the expansion of forest bird range toward higher elevations, the effect of temperature on favouring the colonization of previously climatically unsuitable forests at higher elevations was not negligible. Shrub and forest expansion resulted the main driver of the range contraction for edge and open habitat species, which suffered a distribution shrinkage at their lower elevational boundary. In light of climate warming, these results highlighted how the net range loss for edge and open habitat species, caused by shrub and forest encroachment consequent to land abandonment, should be counteracted by implementing proper conservation management strategies and promoting sustainable economic activities in rangeland areas.
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spelling pubmed-63746762019-02-25 Winners and losers: How the elevational range of breeding birds on Alps has varied over the past four decades due to climate and habitat changes Bani, Luciano Luppi, Massimiliano Rocchia, Emanuel Dondina, Olivia Orioli, Valerio Ecol Evol Original Research Climate warming and habitat transformation are widely recognized as worrying threatening factors. Understanding the individual contribution of these two factors to the change of species distribution could be very important in order to effectively counteract the species range contraction, especially in mountains, where alpine species are strongly limited in finding new areas to be colonized at higher elevations. We proposed a method to disentangle the effects of the two drivers of range change for breeding birds in Italian Alps, in the case of co‐occurring climate warming and shrub and forest encroachment. For each species, from 1982 to 2017, we related the estimated yearly elevational distribution of birds to the correspondent overall average of the daily minimum temperatures during the breeding season and the estimated amount of shrubs and forest cover. Using a hierarchical partitioning approach, we assessed the net contribution (i.e., without the shared effect) of each driver. Both temperature and shrub and forest cover showed a positive trend along the time series and resulted the most likely causes of the significant elevational displacement for 21 of the 29 investigated birds. While shrub and forest cover was found to be an important driver of the expansion of forest bird range toward higher elevations, the effect of temperature on favouring the colonization of previously climatically unsuitable forests at higher elevations was not negligible. Shrub and forest expansion resulted the main driver of the range contraction for edge and open habitat species, which suffered a distribution shrinkage at their lower elevational boundary. In light of climate warming, these results highlighted how the net range loss for edge and open habitat species, caused by shrub and forest encroachment consequent to land abandonment, should be counteracted by implementing proper conservation management strategies and promoting sustainable economic activities in rangeland areas. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2019-01-13 /pmc/articles/PMC6374676/ /pubmed/30805160 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4838 Text en © 2019 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Original Research
Bani, Luciano
Luppi, Massimiliano
Rocchia, Emanuel
Dondina, Olivia
Orioli, Valerio
Winners and losers: How the elevational range of breeding birds on Alps has varied over the past four decades due to climate and habitat changes
title Winners and losers: How the elevational range of breeding birds on Alps has varied over the past four decades due to climate and habitat changes
title_full Winners and losers: How the elevational range of breeding birds on Alps has varied over the past four decades due to climate and habitat changes
title_fullStr Winners and losers: How the elevational range of breeding birds on Alps has varied over the past four decades due to climate and habitat changes
title_full_unstemmed Winners and losers: How the elevational range of breeding birds on Alps has varied over the past four decades due to climate and habitat changes
title_short Winners and losers: How the elevational range of breeding birds on Alps has varied over the past four decades due to climate and habitat changes
title_sort winners and losers: how the elevational range of breeding birds on alps has varied over the past four decades due to climate and habitat changes
topic Original Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374676/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30805160
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4838
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