Winners and losers: How the elevational range of breeding birds on Alps has varied over the past four decades due to climate and habitat changes

Abstract

Climate warming and habitat transformation are widely recognized as worrying threatening factors. Understanding the individual contribution of these two factors to the change of species distribution could be very important in order to effectively counteract the species range contraction, especially in mountains, where alpine species are strongly limited in finding new areas to be colonized at higher elevations. We proposed a method to disentangle the effects of the two drivers of range change for breeding birds in Italian Alps, in the case of co-occurring climate warming and shrub and forest encroachment. For each species, from 1982 to 2017, we related the estimated yearly elevational distribution of birds to the correspondent overall average of the daily minimum temperatures during the breeding season and the estimated amount of shrubs and forest cover. Using a hierarchical partitioning approach, we assessed the net contribution (i.e., without the shared effect) of each driver. Both temperature and shrub and forest cover showed a positive trend along the time series and resulted the most likely causes of the significant elevational displacement for 21 of the 29 investigated birds. While shrub and forest cover was found to be an important driver of the expansion of forest bird range toward higher elevations, the effect of temperature on favouring the colonization of previously climatically unsuitable forests at higher elevations was not negligible. Shrub and forest expansion resulted the main driver of the range contraction for edge and open habitat species, which suffered a distribution shrinkage at their lower elevational boundary. In light of climate warming, these results highlighted how the net range loss for edge and open habitat species, caused by shrub and forest encroachment consequent to land abandonment, should be counteracted by implementing proper conservation management strategies and promoting sustainable economic activities in rangeland areas.

Keywords: climate change; elevational distribution; habitat transformation; hierarchical partitioning; land abandonment; response curve.

Figure 1

Study area (northern Lombardy). In black: area between 600 and 1,800 m asl; in gray: area above 1,800 m asl; dashed area: forest and shrub cover (source: DUSAF‐2015 cartography; ERSAF, 2010). The white area lays below 600 m asl or pertains to Apennines domain (southwestern corner) and was not investigated in the present study

Figure 2

Descriptive statistics between 1980 and 2017 of (a) the shrub and forest cover [km²] and their trend (between 600 m and 1,200 and above 1,200 m asl), and (b) the average of daily minimum temperatures [°C] in the months of May and June and their trend in three elevational belts, in the Alpine areas of the Lombardy Region. For the shrub and forest cover, data were interpolated using a generalized additive model on available survey data (filled circles). For temperatures, data were derived from the E‐OBS dataset. See the text for details on data sources

Figure 3

Proportion of bird species showing a pattern of range change (lower boundary contraction [Contr] in black, upper boundary expansion [Exp] in dark gray and upward shift [Shift], light gray), classified according to (a) habitat breeding preferences (edge [E], forest [F] and open [O]), (b) the migration habit (long‐distance migrants [LDM], residents [RES] and short‐distance migrants [SDM]), and (c) the range change driver (density‐dependent effect [dde], driver not distinguishable [nd], shrub and forest cover [SF], and temperature [tn]). The column width is proportional to the number of bird species belonging to the considered group