The EuroCES provides invaluable long-term monitoring of bird populations and their demography. They also provide a unique opportunity for researchers to ask a wide range of questions about how birds respond to environmental change. Some of the most recent scientific papers published using CES data are highlighted below. For a list of all publications click here.
The influence of climate variability on demographic rates of avian Afro-palearctic migrants.
Morrison, C.A., Butler, S.J., Robinson, R.A., ... &. Gill, J.A. (2020). Proceedings of the Royal Society, B 288:20202955 (https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.2955)
Wildlife conservation policies directed at common and widespread, but declining, species are difficult to design and implement effectively, as multiple environmental changes are likely to contribute to population declines. Conservation actions ultimately aim to influence demographic rates, but targeting actions towards feasible improvements in these is challenging in widespread species with ranges that encompass a wide range of environmental conditions. Across Europe, sharp declines in the abundance of migratory landbirds have driven international calls for action, but actions that could feasibly contribute to population recovery have yet to be identified. Targeted actions to improve conditions on poor-quality sites could be an effective approach, but only if local conditions consistently influence local demography and hence population trends. Using long-term measures of abundance and demography of breeding birds at survey sites across Europe, we show that co-occurring species with differing migration behaviours have similar directions of local population trends and magnitudes of productivity, but not survival rates. Targeted actions to boost local productivity within Europe, alongside large-scale (non-targeted) environmental protection across non-breeding ranges, could therefore help address the urgent need to halt migrant landbird declines. Such demographic routes to recovery are likely to be increasingly needed to address global wildlife declines.
The influence of climate variability on demographic rates of avian Afro-palearctic migrants.
Telenský, T., Klvaňa, P., Jelínek, M., Cepák, J. & Reif, J. (2020). Scientific Reports 10:17592 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-74658-w)
Climate is an important driver of changes in animal population size, but its effect on the underlying demographic rates remains insufficiently understood. This is particularly true for avian long-distance migrants which are exposed to different climatic factors at different phases of their annual cycle. To fill this knowledge gap, we used data collected by a national-wide bird ringing scheme for eight migratory species wintering in sub-Saharan Africa and investigated the impact of climate variability on their breeding productivity and adult survival. While temperature at the breeding grounds could relate to the breeding productivity either positively (higher food availability in warmer springs) or negatively (food scarcity in warmer springs due to trophic mismatch), water availability at the non-breeding should limit the adult survival and the breeding productivity. Consistent with the prediction of the trophic mismatch hypothesis, we found that warmer springs at the breeding grounds were linked with lower breeding productivity, explaining 29% of temporal variance across all species. Higher water availability at the sub-Saharan non-breeding grounds was related to higher adult survival (18% temporal variance explained) but did not carry-over to breeding productivity. Our results show that climate variability at both breeding and non-breeding grounds shapes different demographic rates of long-distance migrants.
Thermal constraints on body size depend on the population position within the species’ thermal range in temperate songbirds.
Dubos, N., Dehorter, O., & Henry, P.-Y. & Le Viol, I. (2019). Global Ecology and Biogeography 28:96-106 (https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.12805)
There is mounting evidence that climate warming can induce morphological changes locally, particularly size reduction. However, the direction of thermal stress may differ between climatic regions. We predicted that morphological response to temperature fluctuations should vary throughout species ranges, depending on the local climate. Hot temperature anomalies are expected to induce size reduction in hot regions where species live close to their upper thermal limit, whereas size stasis (or increase) would be expected in cold regions, where species live close to their lower thermal limit. We tested whether the effect of temperature anomalies on juvenile body size varied along an 11 °C thermal gradient. In warmer springs, juveniles were larger overall at the coldest sites, but this effect decreased toward the hottest sites, becoming negative for two species. Warming should induce body size increases more frequently at the cold edge of species distribution ranges, and rather body size declines at the hot edg. The climate dependency of the effect of weather fluctuations on body size is still under‐acknowledged, and the pattern identified deserves to be investigated over broader climatic gradients and taxonomic coverage. Climate‐driven changes in body size are therefore not uniform across climatic regions and within species ranges.
High intra-specific variation in avian body condition responses to climate limits generalisation across species.
McLean, N; van der Jeugd, H.P.; van de Pol, M. (2018). PLoS ONE 13: e0192401. (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0192401)
It is generally assumed that populations of a species will have similar responses to climate change, and thereby that a single value of sensitivity will reflect species-specific responses. However, this assumption is rarely systematically tested. High intraspecific variation will have consequences for identifying species- or population-level traits that can predict differences in sensitivity, which in turn can affect the reliability of projections of future climate change impacts. We investigate avian body condition responses to changes in six climatic variables and how consistent and generalisable these responses are both across and within species, using 21 years of data from 46 common passerines across 80 Dutch sites. We show that body condition decreases with warmer spring/early summer temperatures and increases with higher humidity, but other climate variables do not show consistent trends across species. In the future, body condition is projected to decrease by 2050, mainly driven by temperature effects. Strikingly, populations of the same species generally responded just as differently as populations of different species implying that a single species signal is not meaningful. Consequently, species-level traits did not explain interspecific differences in sensitivities, rather population-level traits were more important. The absence of a clear species signal in body condition responses implies that generalisation and identifying species for conservation prioritisation is problematic, which sharply contrasts conclusions of previous studies on the climate sensitivity of phenology.
