Bird community change only partially matches landscape habitat change across five decades in North America
Abstract
A common expectation is that as habitats in a landscape change, so do communities within them. However, this niche-based expectation assumes species persist in their favored habitats regardless of how much habitat remains; geometric constraints can counter this when heterogeneous landscapes supply too little of each habitat type for specialists to persist, allowing generalists to dominate. Using North American Breeding Bird Survey data and land-cover reconstructions spanning nearly 50 years, we show environmental heterogeneity decreased slightly, while bird composition became slightly more heterogeneous. Species presence supported niche-based explanations, whereas weighting dominant species revealed patterns consistent with geometric constraints; in both cases, bird community changes were small relative to land-cover shifts. Gains were concentrated among species of intermediate habitat breadth that exploit habitat edges and mosaics, while the broadest generalists declined. Assessing biodiversity responses to land-cover change therefore requires tracking both which species persist and which come to dominate.
Related
- Early Revegetation Initiates Soil Physical Habitat Reconstruction and Microbial Community Reassembly Within the First Growing Season in an Alpine Mining Substrate
- Landscape quality drives ecological responses to habitat loss and fragmentation
- Modeling the Invasion: Habitat Suitability and Landscape Connectivity of Wild Boar ( Sus scrofa ) on Jeju Island, South Korea
- Community Assembly Mechanisms Facilitate Understanding of Microbial Responses to Habitat Transition along a Spatial Environmental Continuum in Alpine Plateaus
- Habitat and landscape outweigh stand age as drivers of species composition in managed temperate forests dominated by Quercus robur L. and Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl
BibTeX
@misc{barbosa2026bird,
title = {{Bird community change only partially matches landscape habitat change across five decades in North America}},
author = {Martha Paola Barajas Barbosa and Kimberly L. Thompson and Nicolas Bianco and Nadja Klein and Jonathan Chase},
howpublished = {EcoEvoRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.32942/x2xd51},
url = {https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/15520/},
note = {CC BY-NC 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Bird community change only partially matches landscape habitat change across five decades in North America
AU - Martha Paola Barajas Barbosa
AU - Kimberly L. Thompson
AU - Nicolas Bianco
AU - Nadja Klein
AU - Jonathan Chase
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/15
PB - EcoEvoRxiv
DO - 10.32942/x2xd51
UR - https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/15520/
AB - A common expectation is that as habitats in a landscape change, so do communities within them. However, this niche-based expectation assumes species persist in their favored habitats regardless of how much habitat remains; geometric constraints can counter this when heterogeneous landscapes supply too little of each habitat type for specialists to persist, allowing generalists to dominate. Using North American Breeding Bird Survey data and land-cover reconstructions spanning nearly 50 years, we show environmental heterogeneity decreased slightly, while bird composition became slightly more heterogeneous. Species presence supported niche-based explanations, whereas weighting dominant species revealed patterns consistent with geometric constraints; in both cases, bird community changes were small relative to land-cover shifts. Gains were concentrated among species of intermediate habitat breadth that exploit habitat edges and mosaics, while the broadest generalists declined. Assessing biodiversity responses to land-cover change therefore requires tracking both which species persist and which come to dominate.
ER -