The Impact Of Climate Warming On Bird Community Structure In Wuyi Mountains

The bird is one of the taxa with a strong ability to disperse.Being sensitive to environmental change advantages the bird an excellent model in the studies of the effects of environmental alternation on ecosystems.To understand beta diversity is a basic challenge for ecologists because of its importance in zoology,ecology,and environmental protection biology.Studying with partitioning beta diversity related to environmental factors,one can get a nuanced understanding of the original drivers of the community structure.Therefore,we attempt to unveil the drivers of bird community structure by studying beta diversity and its partitioning components with climate warming,and then take an insight into the trend of bird community structure.It is helpful in finding the key of biodiversity protection.Wuyi Mountains(WM)is warm and humid because of its subtropical humid monsoon climate,and it is an important montane of the third lad of our country and one of the famous biological hotspots of East Asia.It harbors many bird species which form a complex structure.In the recent 20 years,due to global climate warming,the increasing temperature of WM may have strong effects on the residence in this area which makes WM an ideal field for the study of bird community structure dynamics response to climate warming.In our study,we take a systematic survey in 8 areas in WM in July from 2016 to 2019,56 transects at a total length up to 114.23 kilometers were surveyed,and 3266 individuals of 107 species,83 genus,40 families and 11 orders were recorded.Based on the comprehensive analysis of the bird distribution data and environmental factors,our study explored the response of beta diversity and its partitioning components of bird community to environmental change in the context of climate warming.We obtained the main results and conclusions as follows:(1)The turnover component is the main one of the beta diversity of birds community in WM,and the proportion of the nestedness component is merely 16%.This indicates that the bird community structure of WM mainly maintained by the environmental filtering process.But the increasing nestedness in some areas suggests that the effects of competitive exclusion grow.(2)Under the influence of climate warming,the change of bird community structure takes place in the areas with habitat largely differs from the adjacent area at first and the birds with narrower ecological breadth will be more negatively affected.The environmental factors that determine the beta diversity of birds in WM are mainly climate factors,including annual mean temperature and annual precipitation.Water resource availability is crucial to montane birds.Human activity and the variety of temperature mainly determine the patterns of bird community structure in WM.Human activity effectively alleviates the negative impact of future climate change on bird community structure and release the competitive pressure of birds at the mid-altitude.At present,human activities actually provide some additional resources for birds in WM.From the perspective of beta diversity,the birds tend to move to the cooler adjacent areas,and the closer the distance is,the more obvious the movement is.As there is almost no differences in the vegetation coverage among all the investigated areas,the vegetation coverage shows no significant impact on the beta diversity of local bird community.(3)It is more reasonable to establish multiple protected areas(PAs)in WM to protect more habitats than setting up a super large reserve.Strengthening the protection of old-grown forest and guiding the development of small-scale low-yield agriculture sharing with wild animals in low altitude areas will benefit bird protecting.Our study also gives a detailed report on the bird community structure of WM,which provides data and theoretical support of the protective biological decision.