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306 results for “bird communities”
Data from: Loss of cultural song diversity and the convergence of songs in a declining Hawaiian forest bird community
The effects of population decline on culturally transmitted behaviors in animals has rarely been described, but may have major implications to population viability. Learned vocal signals in birds are of critical importance to behaviors associated with reproduction, intrasexual interactions, and group cohesion, and the complexity of vocal signals such as song can serve as an honest signal of an individual's quality as well as the viability of a population. In this study, we examined how rapid population declines recently experienced by Hawaiian honeycreepers on the island of Kaua'i (USA) may have influenced the diversity, complexity, and similarity of learned honeycreeper songs. We analyzed the acoustic characteristics of songs recorded during 3 time periods over a 40-year time frame for three species of declining Kaua'i honeycreepers. We detected a loss of song complexity and diversity over the 40-year time period that paralleled dramatic population declines. Concurrent with the loss of complexity we also found that the acoustic characteristics of the three honeycreepers' songs became more similar to another. To our knowledge, this is the first documentation of convergence of acoustic characteristics among rapidly declining species. The reduction of song complexity and diversity and convergence of songs not only signals a loss of culturally transmitted behaviors in these endemic Hawaiian honeycreepers, but also potential challenges to recovery of these rapidly declining species. Moreover, the present study highlights that there is a "hidden" cost to declining populations beyond just the loss of individuals that is not often considered, the loss of culturally transmitted social behaviors.
Data from: Contrasting trait assembly patterns in plant and bird communities along environmental and human-induced land-use gradients
Human-driven environmental changes can induce marked shifts in the functional structure of biological communities with possible repercussion on important ecosystem functions and services. At the same time it remains unclear to which extent these changes may differently affect various types of organisms. We investigated species richness and community functional structure of species assemblages at the landscape scale (1km2 plots) for two contrasting model taxa, i.e., plants (producers and sessile organisms) and birds (consumers and mobile organisms), along topography, climate, landscape heterogeneity, and land-use (agriculture and urbanization) gradients in a densely populated region of Switzerland. Our study revealed that agricultural and urban land uses drove marked shifts in the functional structure of biological communities compared to changes along climate and topography gradients, especially for plants, while for birds these changes were comparable. Agricultural and urban land uses enhanced divergence in traits related to resource use for birds (diet and nesting), growth forms, dispersal, and reproductive traits for plants, while it induced convergence in vegetative plant traits (plant height and leaf dry matter content). These results suggest that contrasting assembly patterns may arise within and across taxonomic groups along the same environmental gradients as result of distinct underlying processes and 'organism-specific' environmental perceptions. Our results further suggest a potential homogenization of biological communities, as well as low functional diversity and redundancy levels of bird assemblages in our human-dominated study region. This might potentially compromise the maintenance of key ecological processes under future environmental changes.
Data from: Reciprocal specialization in multihost malaria parasite communities of birds: a temperate-tropical comparison
How specialization of consumers with respect to resources varies with respect to latitude is poorly understood. Coexistence of many species in the tropics might be possible only if specialization also increases. Alternatively, lower average abundance of more diverse biotic resources in the tropics might force consumers to become more generalized foragers. We examine levels of reciprocal specialization in an antagonistic system—avian malaria—to determine whether the number of host species used and/or parasite lineages harbored differ between a temperate and a tropical assemblage. We evaluate the results of network analysis, which can incorporate both bird and parasite perspectives on specialization in one quantitative index, in comparison to null models. Specialization was significantly greater in both sample sites than predicted from null models. We found evidence for lower per-host species parasite diversity in temperate compared to tropical birds. However, specialization did not differ between the tropical and temperate sites from the parasite perspective. We supplemented the network analysis with estimates of specialization that incorporate phylogenetic relationships of associates and found no differences between sites. Thus, our analyses indicate that specialization within an antagonistic host-parasite (resource-consumer) system varies little between tropical and temperate localities.
Data from: Drivers of climate change impacts on bird communities
1. Climate change is reported to have caused widespread changes to species' populations and ecological communities. Warming has been associated with population declines in long-distance migrants and habitat specialists, and increases in southerly distributed species. However, the specific climatic drivers behind these changes remain undescribed. 2. We analysed annual fluctuations in the abundance of 59 breeding bird species in England over 45 years to test the effect of monthly temperature and precipitation means upon population trends. 3. Strong positive correlations between population growth and both winter and breeding season temperature were identified for resident and short-distance migrants. Lagged correlations between population growth and summer temperature and precipitation identified for the first time a widespread negative impact of hot, dry summer weather. Resident populations appeared to increase following wet autumns. Populations of long-distance migrants were negatively affected by May temperature, consistent with a potential negative effect of phenological mismatch upon breeding success. There was evidence for some nonlinear relationships between monthly weather variables and population growth. 4. Habitat specialists and cold-associated species showed consistently more negative effects of higher temperatures than habitat generalists and southerly distributed species associated with warm temperatures. Results suggest that previously reported changes in community composition represent the accumulated effects of spring and summer warming. 5. Long-term population trends were more significantly correlated with species' sensitivity to temperature than precipitation, suggesting that warming has had a greater impact on population trends than changes in precipitation. Months where there had been the greatest warming were the most influential drivers of long-term change. There was also evidence that species with the greatest sensitivity to extremes of precipitation have tended to decline. 6. Our results provide novel insights about the impact of climate change on bird communities. Significant lagged effects highlight the potential for altered species' interactions to drive observed climate change impacts, although some community changes may have been driven by more immediate responses to warming. In England, resident and short-distance migrant populations have increased in response to climate change, but potentially at the expense of long-distance migrants, habitat specialists and cold-associated species.
Data from: Identification of migratory bird flyways in North America using community detection on biological networks
Migratory behavior of waterfowl populations in North America has traditionally been broadly characterized by four north-south flyways, and these flyways have been central to the management of waterfowl populations for more than 80 years. However, previous flyway characterizations are not easily updated with current bird movement data and fail to provide assessments of the importance of specific geographical regions to the identification of flyways. Here, we developed a network model of migratory movement for four waterfowl species —mallard (Anas platyrhnchos), northern pintail (A. acuta), American green-winged teal (A. carolinensis), and Canada goose (Branta canadensis) — in North America using bird band and recovery data. We then identified migratory flyways using a community detection algorithm and characterize the importance of smaller geographic regions in identifying flyways using a novel metric, the consolidation factor. We identified four main flyways for mallards, northern pintails, and American green-winged teal with the flyway identification in Canada geese exhibiting higher complexity. For mallards, flyways were relatively consistent through time. However, consolidation factors revealed that for mallards and green-winged teal the presumptive Mississippi flyway was potentially a zone of high mixing between other flyways. Our results demonstrate that the network approach provides a robust method for flyway identification that is widely applicable given the relatively minimal data requirements and is easily updated with future movement data to reflect changes in flyway definitions and management goals.
Data from: Riparian reserves help protect forest bird communities in oil palm dominated landscapes
1. Conversion of forest to oil palm agriculture is a significant and continuing threat to tropical biodiversity. Despite this, little is known about the value of riparian reserves in oil palm and how these conservation set-asides might best be managed to maintain biodiversity. 2. We characterised bird communities of 28 sites in an oil palm-forest mosaic in Sabah, Malaysia using 6104 encounters from 840 point counts. Sites included oil palm riparian reserves of various vegetation quality and reserve widths, which were compared to oil palm streams without a riparian reserve as well as riparian and non-riparian control areas in continuous logged forest. 3. Riparian reserves, oil palm waterways, and control sites in riparian and non-riparian forest supported distinct avifaunal communities. Riparian reserve width, forest quality and amount of forest cover were the strongest predictors of bird species richness. For forest-dependent species, each of these predictors had stronger effect size when compared with all species. On average, reserves held 31% of all species and 30% of forest specialists, whereas riparian forest controls averaged 32% of all species, but 38% of forest species. 4. Riparian reserves with >40 m of natural vegetation on each bank supported similar bird diversity to riparian forest control habitats found in continuous forest. However, to support equivalent numbers of forest-dependent species and species of conservation concern, reserves would need to be at least 100 m wide on each bank. The highest numbers of species were found in riparian reserves with above-ground carbon densities exceeding 75 tC ha-1, highlighting the importance of forest quality, as well as width, in supporting riparian bird communities. 5. Synthesis and applications. If designed and protected appropriately, riparian reserves in oil palm estates support diverse bird communities, including many species of conservation concern. This can be achieved by designating large reserves (80-200 m total width), but to maximize species numbers forest disturbance should also be minimised prior to conversion as well as during plantation operations.13-Jun-2018
Data from: A taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic perspective on the community assembly of passerine birds along an elevational gradient in southwest China
Integrating multiple-facets of biodiversity to describe spatial and temporal distribution patterns is one way of revealing the mechanisms driving community assembly. We assessed the species, functional and phylogenetic composition and structure of passerine bird communities along an elevational gradient both in wintering and breeding seasons in the Ailao Mountains, southwest China, in order to identify the dominant ecological processes structuring the communities and how these processes change with elevation and season. Our research confirms that the highest taxonomic diversity, and distinct community composition, was found in the moist evergreen broadleaf forest at high elevation in both seasons. Environmental filtering was the dominant force at high elevations with relatively cold and wet climatic conditions, while the observed value of mean pairwise functional and phylogenetic distances of low elevation were constantly higher than expectation in two seasons, suggested interspecific competition could played the key role at low elevations, perhaps because of relative rich resource result from complex vegetation structure and human-induced disturbance. Across all elevations, there was a trend of decreasing intensity of environmental filtering whereas increasing interspecific competition from wintering season to breeding season. This was likely due to the increased resource availability but reproduction-associated competition in the summer months. In general, there is a clear justification for conservation efforts to protect entire elevational gradients in the Ailao Mountains, given the distinct taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic compositions and also elevational migration pattern in passerine bird communities.
Data from: Use of classical bird census transects as spatial replicates for hierarchical modeling of an avian community
New monitoring programs are often designed with some form of temporal replication to deal with imperfect detection by means of occupancy models. However, classical bird census data from earlier times often lack temporal replication, precluding detection-corrected inferences about occupancy. Historical data have a key role in many ecological studies intended to document range shifts, and so need to be made comparable with present‐day data by accounting for detection probability. We analyze a classical bird census conducted in the region of Murcia (SE Spain) in 1991 and 1992 and propose a solution to estimating detection probability for such historical data when used in a community occupancy model: the spatial replication of subplots nested within larger plots allows estimation of detection probability. In our study, the basic sample units were 1‐km transects, which were considered spatial replicates in two aggregation schemes. We fit two Bayesian multispecies occupancy models, one for each aggregation scheme, and evaluated the linear and quadratic effect of forest cover and temperature, and a linear effect of precipitation on species occupancy probabilities. Using spatial rather than temporal replicates allowed us to obtain individual species occupancy probabilities and species richness accounting for imperfect detection. Species‐specific occupancy and community size decreased with increasing annual mean temperature. Both aggregation schemes yielded estimates of occupancy and detectability that were highly correlated for each species, so in the design of future surveys ecological reasons and cost‐effective sampling designs should be considered to select the most suitable aggregation scheme. In conclusion, the use of spatial replication may often allow historical survey data to be applied formally hierarchical occupancy models and be compared with modern‐day data of the species community to analyze global change process.
Data from: Sensitivity of the farmland bird community to crop diversification in Sweden: does the CAP fit?
Crop diversification has been introduced as an environmental strategy in the 'Greening' of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for 2015–2020. The primary target of crop diversification is soil and ecosystem resilience, but claims for potential benefits for farmland biodiversity are also common. However, understanding of relationships between the number (compositional heterogeneity) and spatial arrangement (configurational heterogeneity) of crop fields and biodiversity is generally poor, making such claims relatively unfounded. In this study, we monitored crop and farmland bird diversity on 178 farms across Sweden's main agricultural areas. From a pre-implementation assessment, we show that >97% of the assessed farms would not be required to change their management under the CAP crop diversification measure (minimum of three crops for farms with 30+ ha), suggesting that this measure has generated little change on Swedish farms. While accounting for non-crop elements and farming system (conventional or organic), we show that crop structural diversity (i.e. the management and vegetation structure of crops) rather than crop diversity senso lato positively affected richness of non-crop breeding bird species with stronger effects in arable, compared with forest-dominated landscapes. No such effects were observed among field-nesting farmland bird species. Organic farming had little influence on farmland birds with positive effects only in the most arable-dominated landscapes and for field-nesting species only. In forest-dominated landscapes, organic farms even held lower field-nester densities compared with conventional farms, possibly due to the dominance of grasslands on organic farms that in these landscapes support lower densities of field-nesting species compared with cereals. Policy implications. Our study illustrates the importance of a consideration of structural instead of species diversity of crops for biodiversity, in this case farmland birds. We also underline the absence of such a distinction in current EU Common Agricultural Policy Greening, while simultaneously setting levels on crop diversification too low resulting in little to no change in landscape-scale crop diversity on Swedish farmland. We recommend that future efforts to manage farmland biodiversity should include ways of increasing the structural diversity of crops at the scale of farms and landscapes.
Data from: Disturbed Amazonian forests support diminished breeding bird communities
<p>Twenty percent of the Brazilian Amazon has now been deforested, and deforestation rates are increasing. This compels us to evaluate the conservation potential of human-modified landscapes, yet the ecological value of regenerating and fragmented Amazonian forests remains poorly understood. To date, most faunal studies in disturbed forests have examined metrics derived from presence or abundance. Although valuable, these data cannot tell us how old-growth species are using disturbed forests. In this study, we complement presence data with breeding observations to assess more comprehensively the habitat quality of disturbed forests in central Amazonia. We synthesized breeding evidence from standardized passive mist-netting, mixed-species flock-following, and opportunistic nest-searching across a full annual cycle in 30-35-year-old secondary forest, 10-ha fragments, and undisturbed forest. We then used multi-state occupancy models to estimate the number of undetected breeding species in each forest type, which illustrated that fewer species bred in secondary forest (-43%) and 10-ha fragments (-17%) than in undisturbed forest. Both of these losses are larger than the associated decrease in species richness alone (-17% and -10%, respectively). Notably, we confirmed breeding by only three terrestrial and near-ground insectivores in fragments and secondary forest combined (of the 9 species found in undisturbed forest). Disturbed forests also supported fewer breeding individuals (-35-50%) and, in secondary forest, fewer successful breeding attempts (-24%). Encouragingly, however, some forest-dependent birds are breeding and producing fledglings in disturbed forests, including representatives from almost every guild. This was especially apparent for mixed-species flocks and army-ant followers, two guilds that have historically been considered vulnerable to anthropogenic disturbance. Therefore, despite a loss of breeding habitat in disturbed forests, these data suggest that landscapes composed of regenerating forest and small fragments have conservation potential for forest bird populations.</p>
Strolling through a century: replicating historical bird surveys to explore 100 years of change in an urban bird community
<p>In 1898, Herbert and Alice Walter started a 5-year survey of birds in Lincoln Park, – the largest park in Chicago, IL – and summarized their data in an urban birding field guide, 'Wild Birds in City Parks'. Twenty-nine years later, William Dreuth compared the relative frequency of species between the Walter's study to their own 5-year Lincoln Park survey. Between 2012 and 2015, we replicated these surveys to investigate a century of bird diversity and community composition change in urban Chicago. While species richness did not change, community composition did. We found that 1) species with a greater diet breadth and 2) species that increased in statewide occupancy were more likely to increase in frequency over time. We conclude that factors at multiple scales brought temporal changes to Chicago's bird community. Overall, this survey highlights the slow and subtle ways in which species may respond to a century of urban intensification.</p>
Figure 2 in Urbanization impacts on the trophic guild composition of bird communities
Figure 2. Exploratory boxplot showing the richness of trophic guilds (number of trophic guilds per transect) at each urban stratum of the urban gradient. References: urban (CENTER), suburban (SUB), periurban (PERI), forested (PARK) and natural (NAT) sectors.
Figure 5 in Urbanization impacts on the trophic guild composition of bird communities
Figure 5. Biplot of redundancy analysis (RDA) showing the association between trophic guild abundance and significant habitat structure variables along the urban gradient. Arrow length indicates the importance of the variable in the model and arrow orientation, the direction of the variable increase. References: percentage of area covered by herbaceous vegetation (GRASS); pavement (PAVEM); high buildings (BHIGH) and water bodies (WATERB). Guilds: aquatic diving carnivore (AquaDivCar); aquatic diving omnivore (AquaDivOmn); aquatic filter (AquaFil); aquatic striding carnivore (AquaStrCar); aquatic striding omnivore (AquaStrOmn); bark insectivore (BarkIns); coursing aerial insectivore (CourAerIns); foliage granivore (FoliGra); foliage insectivore (FoliIns); foliage omnivore (FoliOmn); generalized granivore (GeneGra); generalized insectivore (GeneIns); generalized omnivore (GeneOmn); hawking aerial carnivore (HawkAerCar); hawking aerial insectivore (HawkAerIns); nectarivore (Nect); terrestrial granivore (TerrGra); terrestrial insectivore (TerrIns); and terrestrial omnivore (TerrOmn).
Figure 1 in Urbanization impacts on the trophic guild composition of bird communities
Figure 1. Santa Fe city and strata of the urban gradient indicated by circles. The urban matrix is represented by white and water bodies and forested areas with shades of grey. References: urban (CEN), suburban (SUB), periurban (PERI), forested (PARK) and natural (NAT) sectors.
Figure 3 in Urbanization impacts on the trophic guild composition of bird communities
Figure 3. Biplot of redundancy analysis (RDA) showing the association between the richness of each trophic guild and significant habitat structure and human disturbance variables along the urban gradient. Arrow length indicates the importance of the variable in the model and arrow orientation, the direction of the variable increase. References: percentage of area covered by trees/shrubs (TREESHRUB); herbaceous vegetation (GRASS); water bodies (WATERB); pavement (PAVEM); pedestrian rate (PEDESR); and vehicle rate (VEHICLR). Guilds: aquatic diving carnivore (AquaDivCar); aquatic diving omnivore (AquaDivOmn); aquatic filter (AquaFil); aquatic striding carnivore (AquaStrCar); aquatic striding omnivore (AquaStrOmn); bark insectivore (BarkIns); coursing aerial insectivore (CourAerIns); foliage granivore (FoliGra); foliage insectivore (FoliIns); foliage omnivore (FoliOmn); generalized granivore (GeneGra); generalized insectivore (GeneIns); generalized omnivore (GeneOmn); hawking aerial carnivore (HawkAerCar); hawking aerial insectivore (HawkAerIns); nectarivore (Nect); terrestrial granivore (TerrGra); terrestrial insectivore (TerrIns); and terrestrial omnivore (TerrOmn).
Figure 4 in Urbanization impacts on the trophic guild composition of bird communities
Figure 4. Proportion of variance of the purely environmental (Env), spatially structured environmental (EnvSpa) and purely spatial components (Spa) which explain the richness (left) and abundance (right) of trophic guilds across the Santa Fe city.
Figure 6 in Differences in the bird community between a regenerating area and a native forest in Southeastern Brazil
Figure 6. Linear regression between land cover diversity (predictor variable) and bird diversity (response variable). We included an interval of confidence of 95% (grey area). The sampled point counts were pooled according to each site (blue dots – REGEN; orange dots – FOREST).
Figure 3 in Differences in the bird community between a regenerating area and a native forest in Southeastern Brazil
Figure 3. nMDS ordination for the faunal composition (a), the feeding guilds (b) and the foraging strata (c). Each number represents one of the point counts, divided by site (FOREST – points 01–12; REGEN. – points 13–24). The polygons delimit the convex hulls for each group (FOREST and REGEN), showing the absence of superposition of the samples in the multivariate space.
Figure 5 in Differences in the bird community between a regenerating area and a native forest in Southeastern Brazil
Figure 5. Fisher's alpha diversity index for each site (FOREST and REGEN). Boxes represent 25–75% percentiles, while the horizontal black lines represent the median, and whiskers represent 10–90% percentiles.
Figure 4 in Differences in the bird community between a regenerating area and a native forest in Southeastern Brazil
Figure 4. Rarefaction curves of FOREST and REGEN sites. The polygons (circle and triangle) represents the exact number of individuals obtained for a respective site. The unbroken line represents the interpolation curve, while the dotted line represents the extrapolation one. The shaded area refers to the interval of confidence.
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Allen Brain Atlas
Allen Brain Atlas is an Allen Institute collection of brain map atlases, datasets, APIs, and analysis tools covering mouse, human, and non-human primate brain resources.
Annotated Behaviour and Observability Dataset (ABODe)
ABODe is a University of Edinburgh DataShare dataset for behavior classification in group-housed mice using home-cage video, identities, bounding boxes, ground-plate positions, and annotator labels.
DANDI Archive for NWB datasets
DANDI is a BRAIN Initiative archive for publishing and sharing neurophysiology data, including electrophysiology, optophysiology, and behavioral data packaged as NWB and related standards.
International Brain Laboratory public data
The International Brain Laboratory public data releases expose standardized mouse decision-making experiments, including Neuropixels recordings, widefield calcium imaging, behavior, and session metadata accessed through the ONE API.
OpenNeuro
OpenNeuro is a free, open platform for sharing neuroimaging datasets, with public search, dataset pages, and download paths for web, S3, DataLad, and the OpenNeuro CLI.