Skip to content
DraconiticResearch
Search Sources API
194,161 studies31 sourcesUpdated 21 min ago
PreprintCC BY-NC 4.0EcoEvoRxiv

The reported decline in bird diversity tracks birdwatching effort, not birds

  • Chenchen Ding
  • Yang Liu
  • Zhengwang Zhang
  • Zhiheng Wang
Open at sourcePDFDOICite

Abstract

A recent analysis in Science links a photovoltaic policy-stringency index to citizen-science bird records aggregated to county-months and concludes that China’s solar-expansion policy reduced Shannon diversity by 2.10% per standard deviation of stringency. Reproducing that estimate exactly from the replication package and checking its inputs against record-level data from the same platform, we show that the outcome variable measures the observation process rather than bird communities: nearly half of the checklists carry no abundance information, corrupted counts enter the regression unfiltered, and birdwatching effort grew 171-fold while concentrating in accessible, economically developed counties, in step with policy stringency. Once total effort is modeled, the coefficient reverses sign and is null in all 18 effort-adjusted specifications; the preferred estimate,

Related

  1. Nonlinear survey-effort adjustment removes the reported bird-diversity effect
    Canran Liu
    EcoEvoRxivPreprintCC BY 4.0Full textEcologyEvolutionary biologyEcoEvoRxiv
  2. Breath-by-breath parasternal intercostal muscle stiffening tracks inspiratory effort during graded inspiratory threshold loading in humans
    Axel Nierding, Eloïse Chamalet, Thomas Similowski +2
    Journal of Applied PhysiologyPeer-reviewedCC BY-NC-ND 4.0Full text1 citedGeneral biologyPhysiologyHAL
  3. Elevational filtering reshapes mountain understory communities through diversity decline, functional shifts, and species replacement
    S. W. Gillani, M. Ahmad, M. Manzoor +1
    bioRxivPreprintCC BY-NC-NDFull textEcologybioRxiv
  4. Open filament tracks drive Bacteroidota gliding motility
    H. L. Miller, R. L. Jones, A. Kjaer +3
    bioRxivPreprintAll rights reservedFull textMicrobiologybioRxiv
  5. COGNITIVE HETEROGENEITY AND AGING: AN AGE-INDEPENDENT CILIARY GENE PROGRAM TRACKS COGNITIVE RESILIENCE IN MICE
    S. Logan, A. Unnikrishnan, M. Baier +7
    bioRxivPreprintAll rights reservedFull textZoology & animal behaviourbioRxiv

Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@misc{ding2026reported,
  title = {{The reported decline in bird diversity tracks birdwatching effort, not birds}},
  author = {Chenchen Ding and Yang Liu and Zhengwang Zhang and Zhiheng Wang},
  howpublished = {EcoEvoRxiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  doi = {10.32942/x23x30},
  url = {https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/14715/},
  note = {CC BY-NC 4.0},
}
RIS
TY  - UNPB
TI  - The reported decline in bird diversity tracks birdwatching effort, not birds
AU  - Chenchen Ding
AU  - Yang Liu
AU  - Zhengwang Zhang
AU  - Zhiheng Wang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/07
PB  - EcoEvoRxiv
DO  - 10.32942/x23x30
UR  - https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/14715/
AB  - A recent analysis in Science links a photovoltaic policy-stringency index to citizen-science bird records aggregated to county-months and concludes that China’s solar-expansion policy reduced Shannon diversity by 2.10% per standard deviation of stringency. Reproducing that estimate exactly from the replication package and checking its inputs against record-level data from the same platform, we show that the outcome variable measures the observation process rather than bird communities: nearly half of the checklists carry no abundance information, corrupted counts enter the regression unfiltered, and birdwatching effort grew 171-fold while concentrating in accessible, economically developed counties, in step with policy stringency. Once total effort is modeled, the coefficient reverses sign and is null in all 18 effort-adjusted specifications; the preferred estimate,
ER  -