TY - JOUR
T1 - Looking for compensation at multiple scales in a wetland bird community
AU - Barraquand, Frédéric
AU - Picoche, Coralie
AU - Aluome, Christelle
AU - Carassou, Laure
AU - Feigné, Claude
N1 - Funding Information:
We warmly thank the birdwatchers and staff of the Teich Reserve/Landes Gascogne regional park who contributed to data collection over the years, as well as LPO Aquitaine for helping us retrieve the raw data. Constructive feedback by six referees—Roel van Klink, Mike Fowler, and four anonymous others—and three associate editors considerably improved the manuscript. The data collection was supported by the Landes Gascogne regional park and the Teich municipality, while data analysis was funded by LabEx COTE (ANR‐10‐LABX‐45) and a grant to FB (ANR‐20‐CE45‐0004).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2022/6
Y1 - 2022/6
N2 - Compensatory dynamics, during which community composition shifts despite a near-constant total community size, are usually rare: Synchronous dynamics prevail in natural communities. This is a puzzle for ecologists, because of the key role of compensation in explaining the relation between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. However, most studies so far have considered compensation in either plants or planktonic organisms, so that evidence for the generality of such synchrony is limited. Here, we extend analyses of community-level synchrony to wetland birds. We analyze a 35-year monthly survey of a community where we suspected that compensation might occur due to potential competition and changes in water levels, favoring birds with different habitat preferences. We perform both year-to-year analyses by season, using a compensation/synchrony index, and multiscale analyses using a wavelet-based measure, which allows for both scale- and time-dependence. We analyze synchrony both within and between guilds, with guilds defined either as tightknit phylogenetic groups or as larger functional groups. We find that abundance and biomass compensation are rare, likely due to the synchronizing influence of climate (and other drivers) on birds, even after considering several temporal scales of covariation (during either cold or warm seasons, above or below the annual scale). Negative covariation in abundance at the guild or community level did only appear at the scale of a few months or several years. We also found that synchrony varies with taxonomic and functional scale: The rare cases where compensation appeared consistently in year-to-year analyses were between rather than within functional groups. Our results suggest that abundance compensation may have more potential to emerge between broad functional groups rather than between species, and at relatively long temporal scales (multiple years for vertebrates), above that of the dominant synchronizing driver.
AB - Compensatory dynamics, during which community composition shifts despite a near-constant total community size, are usually rare: Synchronous dynamics prevail in natural communities. This is a puzzle for ecologists, because of the key role of compensation in explaining the relation between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. However, most studies so far have considered compensation in either plants or planktonic organisms, so that evidence for the generality of such synchrony is limited. Here, we extend analyses of community-level synchrony to wetland birds. We analyze a 35-year monthly survey of a community where we suspected that compensation might occur due to potential competition and changes in water levels, favoring birds with different habitat preferences. We perform both year-to-year analyses by season, using a compensation/synchrony index, and multiscale analyses using a wavelet-based measure, which allows for both scale- and time-dependence. We analyze synchrony both within and between guilds, with guilds defined either as tightknit phylogenetic groups or as larger functional groups. We find that abundance and biomass compensation are rare, likely due to the synchronizing influence of climate (and other drivers) on birds, even after considering several temporal scales of covariation (during either cold or warm seasons, above or below the annual scale). Negative covariation in abundance at the guild or community level did only appear at the scale of a few months or several years. We also found that synchrony varies with taxonomic and functional scale: The rare cases where compensation appeared consistently in year-to-year analyses were between rather than within functional groups. Our results suggest that abundance compensation may have more potential to emerge between broad functional groups rather than between species, and at relatively long temporal scales (multiple years for vertebrates), above that of the dominant synchronizing driver.
KW - biodiversity
KW - birds
KW - compensation
KW - synchrony
KW - time series
KW - wavelets
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U2 - 10.1002/ece3.8876
DO - 10.1002/ece3.8876
M3 - Article
C2 - 35784078
AN - SCOPUS:85133141452
SN - 2045-7758
VL - 12
JO - Ecology and Evolution
JF - Ecology and Evolution
IS - 6
M1 - e8876
ER -