Leading ecologists from our Department of Biosciences and Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Germany have predicted in their latest research that bird communities will change worldwide in 2080 due to climate change, largely as result of shifting their ranges.
Leading ecologists from our Department of Biosciences and Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Germany have predicted in their latest research that bird communities will change worldwide in 2080 due to climate change, largely as result of shifting their ranges.
To predict changes in species distributions, the team of scientists related past bird distributions to climate data and then applied these relationships to two future climate scenarios – based on low and medium greenhouse gas emissions.
Phylogenetic Diversity
The team looked not only at changes in numbers of species in areas but also at the types of species that would occur. To summarise changes in species types, they calculated something called phylogenetic diversity that summarises how many different types of birds would occur.
For example, a community that had a lot of closely-related species, such as insect-eating songbirds, would have a much lower phylogenetic diversity score than a community that included a mix of more distantly-related species, for example songbirds plus other species such as birds of prey, partridges or gulls.
Read more at Durham University
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