Climate change will cause bird communities to change worldwide in 2080, according to scientists from Durham University, UK and Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre.
The team of scientists connected past bird distributions to climate data and applied these relationships to two future climate scenarios to predict changes in species distributions.
The team looked at more than just the number of species in the area. They calculated the number of different types of birds that would occur.
A community with a lot of closely related species, such as insect-eating songbirds, would have a lower diversity score than a community with more distantly related species.
They discovered that climate change will affect species numbers and community composition, as well as have profound effects on phylogenetic diversity and community composition.
European bee-eaters, a type of insect-eating bird, black-winged stilts and spoonbills, all of which breed further south in Europe but now occasionally breed in the UK, are examples of bird species that are increasing their range in the UK. Bee-eaters are related to other birds in the UK. New species such as spoonbills and black-winged stilts have increased the diversity of birds in the UK.
As bird species respond to climate change by shifting their distribution, the researchers evaluated data for a total of 8,768 bird species to predict how many different lineages could be lost.
The researchers think that the majority of species losses are in tropical and subtropical areas.
Preservation of local phylogenetic diversity can be a key to the resilience of biological diversity.
The full study has been published.
We looked at the effects of global warming on the distribution of birds. The focus of the study was on how closely related the species are to each other.
The co-author of the study said that the diversity of lineages is related to the diversity of trait that species possess. Different types of beaks can be found in species from more distant ancestors. Change means that the function that birds perform in an area may change in the future with consequences for food webs, seed dispersal and plant pollination.
Diverse measures are important in climate impact assessments.
More information: Alke Voskamp et al, Projected climate change impacts on the phylogenetic diversity of the world's terrestrial birds: more than species numbers, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.2184 Journal information: Proceedings of the Royal Society B
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