Impacts of climate change on upland birds: complex interactions, compensatory mechanisms and the need for long-term data

摘要

The study of phenology, the timing of events in an organism’s life cycle, has been one of the cornerstones of research into the impacts of climate change on biodiversity. There have been widespread changes to the phenology of biological systems (Parmesan & Yohe 2003, Parmesan 2007, Thackeray et al. 2010), which have been most apparent in the Northern Hemisphere (Schwartz et al. 2006). There is good evidence from Europe and North America that many bird species now breed earlier in the year as a result of warmer spring weather. Such changes may not in themselves be harmful, but when organisms at different trophic levels respond at different rates, community interactions can be disrupted (Walther 2010). Some of the best examples of such phenological mismatches come from birds. Studies of a number of woodland insectivorous passerines such as Pied Flycatcher Ficedula kypoleuca (Both & Visser 2005) and Great Tit Pams major (Visser et al. 1998, Husby et al. 2009) have shown that breeding success has beenreduced as a result of differential warming effects on birds and their caterpillar prey. These effects are not ubiquitous, however, and other studies have failed to detect such mismatches, even in other populations of woodland birds (Cresswell & McCleery 2003, Waite & Strickland 2006, Wesolowski & Maziarz 2009, Vatka et al. 2011).