Abstract
Ensuring connectivity is crucial to protect landscapes but it requires knowledge about how animals use ecosystems throughout the year. However, animal movements remain largely unknown in biodiversity hotspots, even for species that fulfill key ecological roles, as is the case of hummingbirds in the Andes. In the complex topography of mountain slopes, movement of these avian pollinators may occur either between habitat patches with asynchronous plant blooms or across ecosystems that are located within the same elevation bands or along altitudinal gradients. Here, we used two decades (2000–2020) of records from citizen science data and boosted regression trees to predict monthly distributions for 55 hummingbird species in the Andes. We identified shifts in altitudinal distribution between contiguous months and calculated changes in the proportion of predicted distributions occupied by ecosystem types. Our findings reveal substantial altitudinal movement and differences in the proportion of ecosystem types utilized throughout the year that had not been previously reported for several species. Yet the magnitude of altitudinal and ecosystem shifts varies between hummingbird clades, and in some cases changes in the proportion of ecosystem types within estimated distributions occurs with little variation in altitude. All ecosystems across the Andes show temporal changes in hummingbird occurrence, but these are higher in natural landscapes compared to croplands or urban areas. Finally, we used phylogenetic logistic regression to test whether altitudinal and ecosystem shifts affect population trends. We found that higher ecosystem seasonality is more strongly associated with decreasing populations in comparison to altitudinal shifts. Altogether, our study reveals complex patterns of movement in hummingbirds and highlights the importance of ecological connectivity across different ecosystem types. More generally, it demonstrates the opportunity of using citizen science data to increase understanding about species' seasonal occurrences, so that landscapes can be better managed to protect animal movement. Keywords: boosted regression trees, eBird, ecological connectivity, species distribution models.
Original language | English |
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Article number | e06735 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Ecography |
Volume | 2024 |
Issue number | 3 |
Early online date | 12 Dec 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Mar 2024 |
Bibliographical note
AcknowledgementsWe thank all the people who love birds and contribute their observations to public citizen science databases such as eBird, providing researchers with powerful datasets to study nature. We are grateful to colleagues who gave useful suggestions to improve this work, including Stephen C. F. Palmer, Julián Pérez-Correa, David Burslem and Thomas Bodey. We also thank NERC for funding C.R.-U.
Funding
This work was supported by the UKRI Natural Environment Research Council (grant no. NE/S007377/1).
Data Availability Statement
Data availability statement:Data are available from the Dryad Digital Repository: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.w3r2280xs (Rueda-Uribe et al. 2023).Supporting information
The Supporting information associated with this article is available with the online version.
Keywords
- boosted regression trees
- eBird
- ecological connectivity
- species distribution models