Farmland bird assemblages exhibit higher functional and phylogenetic diversity than forest assemblages in France

• Autor(a) principal: García-Navas, Vicente
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Thuiller, Wilfried
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/45397

Aim: Under a global change scenario, research focused on changes in assembly patterns over spatial and temporal axes is more than timely as it will improve our understanding about how biological communities respond to anthropogenic disturbance. Despite an increasing need to assess whether associations among diversity and community metrics change in relation to environmental heterogeneity, the way in which community assembly rules vary across habitats has been hardly explored. Here, we tested for differences in patterns of functional diversity (FD) and phylogenetic diversity (PD) between farmland and forest bird communities. Taxon: 107 species of breeding common birds. Location: continental France. Methods: We used an extensive dataset (13 years; 7,115 bird communities) from the French Breeding Bird survey in conjunction with a matrix of 142 functional traits (including information on habitat, diet, life-stories, behaviour, and morphology) to compute different metrics of FD and PD. Results: We found that farmland assemblages showed higher FD and PD than forest assemblages, which were phylogenetically clustered. Both FD and PD of forest assemblages increased with increasing species richness, whereas in farmland assemblages the relationship turned out to be asymptotic in both cases. It may be due to the accumulation of generalists, which can end up displacing specialist species when the environment becomes oversaturated triggering a decline in diversity. Contrary to expectations, FD and PD of farmland assemblages increased over the study period, whereas forest assemblages showed a non-linear pattern. Farmland and forest assemblages also showed divergent trajectories over time in relation to FD metrics. Main conclusions: We conclude that, although farmland intensification has led to a sharp decline in population of farmland birds, agriculture landscapes in Southern Europe still harbor diversity-rich communities probably due to the legacy effects of past land-use (traditional practices). Our study highlights the need to take into account the influence of historic landscape configurations when assessing the effect that contemporary land uses have on biotic communities.