Anthropogenic drivers of avian community turnover from local to regional scales.

Anthropogenic change has altered the composition and function of ecological communities across the globe. As a result, there is a need for studies examining observed community compositional change and determining whether and how anthropogenic change drivers may be influencing that turnover. In particular, it is also important to determine to what extent community turnover is idiosyncratic or if turnover can be explained by predictable responses across species based on traits or niche characteristics. Here, we measured turnover in avian communities across North America from 1990 to 2016 in the Breeding Bird Survey using an ordination method, and modeled turnover as a function of land use and climate change drivers from local to regional scales. We also examined how turnover may be attributed to species groups, including foraging guilds, trophic groups, migratory distance, and breeding biomes. We found that at local scales, land use change explained a greater proportion of variance in turnover than climate change variables, while as scale increased, trends in temperature explained a greater proportion of variance in turnover. We also found across the study region, turnover could be attributed to one of a handful of species undergoing strong expansions or strong declines over the study time period. We did not observe consistent patterns in compositional change in any trait groups we examined except for those that included previously identified highly influential species. Our results have two important implications: First, the relative importance of different anthropogenic change drivers may vary with scale, which should be considered in studies' modeling impacts of global change on biodiversity. Second, in North American avian communities, individual species undergoing large shifts in population may drive signals in compositional change, and composite community turnover metrics should be carefully selected as a result.

Increased spatial and temporal autocorrelation of temperature under climate change.

Understanding spatiotemporal variation in environmental conditions is important to determine how climate change will impact ecological communities. The spatial and temporal autocorrelation of temperature can have strong impacts on community structure and persistence by increasing the duration and the magnitude of unfavorable conditions in sink populations and disrupting spatial rescue effects by synchronizing spatially segregated populations. Although increases in spatial and temporal autocorrelation of temperature have been documented in historical data, little is known about how climate change will impact these trends. We examined daily air temperature data from 21 General Circulation Models under the business-as-usual carbon emission scenario to quantify patterns of spatial and temporal autocorrelation between 1871 and 2099. Although both spatial and temporal autocorrelation increased over time, there was significant regional variation in the temporal autocorrelation trends. Additionally, we found a consistent breakpoint in the relationship between spatial autocorrelation and time around the year 2030, indicating an acceleration in the rate of increase of the spatial autocorrelation over the second half of the 21st century. Overall, our results suggest that ecological populations might experience elevated extinction risk under climate change because increased spatial and temporal autocorrelation of temperature is expected to erode both spatial and temporal refugia.