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. 2012;7(3):e32819.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032819. Epub 2012 Mar 12.

Relating habitat and climatic niches in birds

Jean-Yves Barnagaud  1 , Vincent Devictor, Frédéric Jiguet, Morgane Barbet-Massin, Isabelle Le Viol, Frédéric Archaux
Affiliations

Relating habitat and climatic niches in birds

Jean-Yves Barnagaud et al. PLoS One. 2012.

Abstract

Predicting species' responses to the combined effects of habitat and climate changes has become a major challenge in ecology and conservation biology. However, the effects of climatic and habitat gradients on species distributions have generally been considered separately. Here, we explore the relationships between the habitat and thermal dimensions of the ecological niche in European common birds. Using data from the French Breeding Bird Survey, a large-scale bird monitoring program, we correlated the habitat and thermal positions and breadths of 74 bird species, controlling for life history traits and phylogeny. We found that cold climate species tend to have niche positions in closed habitats, as expected by the conjunction of the biogeographic history of birds' habitats, and their current continent-scale gradients. We also report a positive correlation between thermal and habitat niche breadths, a pattern consistent with macroecological predictions concerning the processes shaping species' distributions. Our results suggest that the relationships between the climatic and habitat components of the niche have to be taken into account to understand and predict changes in species' distributions.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Definition of the ecological niche used in this article.
(A) The environmental space can be represented as a set of axes (here, two: X, Y), each representing a gradient of resource or condition. A species' niche is defined as the range of each of these gradients that the species can exploit/occupy/cope with (yellow ellipse). The projection of the niche on each gradient is defined by a position (Px, Py) and a breadth (red solid lines). In our analyses, we consider two axes: (B) a thermal axis (referred to in the text as ‘thermal niche’) corresponds to a gradient of temperature; (C) a habitat axis (‘habitat niche’) refers to a gradient of vegetation structure ranging from mature forest to grasslands and open fields (see also Table 1).
Figure 2
Figure 2. Map of the 1391 FBBS plots surveyed at least once during the period 2002–2008.
Each plot consists of a 4 km2 square within which the abundances of breeding birds are surveyed through 10 point counts reflecting the local diversity of habitats.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Relationship between position and breadth in each of the niche dimensions considered (A: thermal; B: habitat) for 74 European bird species.
Thermal positions and breadths are log-transformed. Variables are scaled to mean = 0, SD = 1 for interpretability.
Figure 4
Figure 4. Relationship between thermal and habitat niches for 74 European bird species.
(A) Relationship between niche positions; (B) relationship between niche breadths. The linear relationships (dashed lines) and their confidence intervals (dotted lines) are derived from averaged coefficients resulting from phylogenetic generalized least square regressions, after AICc-based model selection. Thermal positions and breadths are log transformed to approach a normal distribution. Both thermal and habitat positions are scaled to mean = 0, SD = 1. DELURB: Delichon urbicum, HIRRUS: Hirundo rustica. MOTALB: Motacilla alba. MOTFLA: Motacilla flava, PASDOM: Passer domesticus. PICPIC: Pica pica. STRDEC: Streptopelia decaocto. STRTUR: Streptopelia turtur.
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