10.5061/DRYAD.V9S4MW6V2
Fusco, Johanna
0000-0002-7028-1608
Mediterranean Institute of Marine and Terrestrial Biodiversity and Ecology
Emily, Walker
National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment
Julien, Papaïx
National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment
Marta, Debolini
National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment
Alberte, Bondeau
0000-0002-8729-5061
Mediterranean Institute of Marine and Terrestrial Biodiversity and Ecology
Jean-Yves, Barnagaud
Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive
Land use changes threaten bird taxonomic and functional diversity across
the Mediterranean basin: a spatial analysis to prioritize monitoring for
conservation
Dryad
dataset
2021
2021-03-08T00:00:00Z
2021-03-08T00:00:00Z
en
https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2021.612356
https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2021.612356
1458256954 bytes
2
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Land use changes rank among the highest threats to biodiversity, but
assessment of their ecological impact is impaired by data paucity in vast
regions of the world. For birds, land use changes may mean habitat loss or
fragmentation, changes in resource availability and disruption of biotic
interactions or dispersal pathways. As a result, avian population sizes
and assemblage diversity decline in areas subjected to urbanization,
agricultural intensification and land abandonment worldwide. This threat
is especially sensitive in hotspots such as the Mediterranean basin, where
avifaunas of several biogeographic origins meet, encompassing numerous
endemic taxa and ecological specialists with low resilience to habitat
modifications. Here, we correlated several facets of bird taxonomic and
functional diversity to a fine-grained land-use change classification, in
order to identify priority areas in need for enforced protocoled bird
sampling in a conservation prospect. For this, we computed the species
richness, functional richness, originality and specificity of 211 bird
assemblages based on bird extent-of-occurrence data for 279 species and 10
ecological traits. We used a spatialized regression model to correlate
bird diversity patterns with bioclimatic gradients and land use change
between 1992 and 2018, assessed from an unsupervised clustering on 2km
resolution data. We showed that species-rich bird assemblages are
subjected to agricultural intensification, while functionally diverse
assemblages are mainly undergoing desertification and land abandonment.
Unfortunately, most of these changes occur in areas where protocoled bird
surveys with sufficient spatial and temporal resolution are lacking. In
light of these results, we urge for the setting of bird monitoring
programs targeted mainly on parts of North-Africa and the Levant, in order
to allow a region-level evaluation of the threat posed by recent land use
changes on the exceptional avifaunistic diversity of the basin. Fostering
such regional-scale evaluations of congruences between human threats and
centers of diversity is a necessary preliminary step for a pragmatic
response to data deficiencies and ultimately setting appropriate responses
to avoid the collapse of avian assemblages.
A ReadMe file containing all necessary information on data and processing
have been uploaded along with the datasets.