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Species-specific traits mediate avian demographic responses under past climate change

Nature Ecology & Evolution (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Anticipating species’ responses to environmental change is a pressing mission in biodiversity conservation. Despite decades of research investigating how climate change may affect population sizes, historical context is lacking, and the traits that mediate demographic sensitivity to changing climate remain elusive. We use whole-genome sequence data to reconstruct the demographic histories of 263 bird species over the past million years and identify networks of interacting morphological and life history traits associated with changes in effective population size (Ne) in response to climate warming and cooling. Our results identify direct and indirect effects of key traits representing dispersal, reproduction and survival on long-term demographic responses to climate change, thereby highlighting traits most likely to influence population responses to ongoing climate warming.

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Fig. 1: Demographic histories of 263 avian species from 30 thousand years ago (kya) to 1 million years ago (Mya) (x axis presented on the log10 scale).
Fig. 2: Demographic histories of different avian groups from 30 kya to 1 Mya (all x axes presented on the log10 scale).
Fig. 3: Mean change in normalized Ne from 30 kya to 1 Mya for 263 avian species, summarized by zoogeographic realm.
Fig. 4: Network effects of key morphological and life history traits on demographic responses to climate warming and climate cooling, shown as directed acyclic graphs (left) and corresponding standardized regression coefficients (±s.e.) (right) for averaged best-performing models.

Data availability

All data underlying these analyses (including raw Ne estimates over time for each species) are available in the Dryad Digital Repository38.

Code availability

All code underlying these analyses is available in the Dryad Digital Repository38.

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Acknowledgements

This work was made possible by the generous efforts of field biologists and museum staff who contributed samples to the B10k Project. This work was supported by a National Natural Science Foundation of China grant (nos. 32170626 and 31901214) to S.F., an Independent Research Fund Denmark grant to D.N.-B. and G.Z. (no. 8021-00282B) and grants from the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (no. XDB31020000), International Partnership Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (no. 152453KYSB20170002), Carlsberg Foundation (no. CF16-0663) and Villum Foundation (no. 25900) to G.Z.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Ryan R. Germain, Shaohong Feng.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Macroecology, Evolution, and Climate, The Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Ryan R. Germain, Gary R. Graves, Carsten Rahbek, Jon Fjeldså, Peter A. Hosner & David Nogués-Bravo

  2. Villum Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, Section for Ecology and Evolution, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Ryan R. Germain & Guojie Zhang

  3. Center for Evolutionary and Organismal Biology, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China

    Shaohong Feng & Guojie Zhang

  4. Liangzhu Laboratory, Zhejiang University Medical Center, Hangzhou, China

    Shaohong Feng & Guojie Zhang

  5. Department of General Surgery of Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China

    Shaohong Feng

  6. Innovation Center of Yangtze River Delta, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Shaohong Feng & Guojie Zhang

  7. BGI Shenzhen, Shenzhen, China

    Guangji Chen

  8. College of Life Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Guangji Chen

  9. Department of Vertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA

    Gary R. Graves

  10. Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Ascot, UK

    Joseph A. Tobias & Carsten Rahbek

  11. Center for Global Mountain Biodiversity, The Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Carsten Rahbek & Peter A. Hosner

  12. Danish Institute for Advanced Study, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Carsten Rahbek

  13. Key Laboratory of Zoological Systematics and Evolution, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Fumin Lei

  14. Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Jon Fjeldså & Peter A. Hosner

  15. Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics, The Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    M. Thomas P. Gilbert

  16. Department of Natural History, University Museum, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    M. Thomas P. Gilbert

  17. State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, China

    Guojie Zhang

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Contributions

R.R.G., S.F., G.Z. and D.N-B. designed the study and wrote the paper. R.R.G., S.F. and G.C. carried out analyses. R.R.G., S.F., G.C., G.R.G., J.A.T., C.R., F.L., J.F., P.A.H., M.T.P.G., G.Z. and D.N-B. contributed towards the assembly of genomic and morphological and life history data, discussion of results and reviewing and editing the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Ryan R. Germain, Guojie Zhang or David Nogués-Bravo.

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Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Nicolas Dussex and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Notes 1–3, Tables 1–12, Figs. 1–24 and additional references.

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Germain, R.R., Feng, S., Chen, G. et al. Species-specific traits mediate avian demographic responses under past climate change. Nat Ecol Evol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02055-3

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