Climate change will impact bird species

Climate change will not only impact the number of bird species by 2080 but also have profound effects on their diversity and community composition, according to a study.

The scientists related past bird distributions to climate data and then applied these relationships to two future climate scenarios - based on low and medium greenhouse gas emissions - to predict changes in species distributions. The team looked not only at changes in numbers of species in areas but also at the types of species that would occur.

To summarise changes in species types they calculated something called phylogenetic diversity that summarises how many different types of birds would occur. For example, a community that had a lot of closely-related species, such as insect-eating songbirds, would have a much lower phylogenetic diversity score than a community that included a mix of more distantly-related species, for example songbirds plus other species such as birds of prey, partridges or gulls.

The researchers analysed how the communities of birds all over the world could change in the future and discovered that that climate change will not only affect species numbers but will also have profound effects on phylogenetic diversity and community composition.