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Climate warming is driving species to shift their geographical distribution poleward to track suitable climatic conditions. Two strategies have been suggested to help species respond to climate warming: facilitating distribution change or improving persistence. We questioned whether habitat management in favour of duck hunting activities interacted with duck responses to climate warming. We studied nonbreeding waterbird community changes (110 species) over 28 years at 851 sites in South-West Europe, where habitat management is a common practice to attract and hunt ducks. We hypothesized that duck species targeted by habitat management do not need to track temperature changes as much as non-hunted species, because of the availability of suitable habitats provided by hunting land managers. We used the community temperature index (CTI) to assess the temporal responses of communities and species to climate warming. We compared the effect of hunting status with other functional traits on species responses, controlling for phylogenetic relatedness. The CTI trend has increased over the study period, indicating a community adjustment to climate warming. However, hunted ducks contributed to almost 40% of the negative contributions to this community adjustment, suggesting that hunted ducks do not shift their distribution as much as the other waterbirds do. Winter fidelity associated with the provision of attractive feeding grounds might explain why ducks did not seem to shift their distribution in response to climate warming. This study suggests the broad impact of human activities on wildlife, including on large-scale distribution processes, and questions the long-term consequences on duck populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate warming is driving changes in species distribution, but habitat characteristics can interact with warming temperatures to affect populations in unexpected ways. We investigated wintering waterbird responses to climate warming depending on habitat characteristics, with a focus on the northern boundary of their non‐breeding distributions where winter climatic conditions are more extreme. At these Nordic latitudes, climate warming is expected to drive positive changes in species occurrence and abundance, with likely differences in species‐specific responses. We analyzed the occurrence and abundance of 18 species of waterbirds monitored over 2,982 surveys at 245 inland wetlands over a 25‐year period in Sweden. We used hierarchical modeling of species communities (HMSC) which enabled us to relate species‐specific changes to both functional traits and phylogenetic relatedness. We investigated occurrence and abundance changes in response to average temperature, temperature anomalies, site area, site protection status (Natura 2000), and land use in agricultural and urban surfaces. Unsurprisingly, both average temperatures and temperature anomalies were the most important variables influencing positively waterbird occurrence and abundance. For 60% of the species, the effect of temperature anomalies was even stronger in large or protected wetlands. Geese and mallard occurred more often at sites surrounded by agricultural and urban surfaces, respectively, but their occurrence in these habitats was not affected by interactive effects with climate warming. Species abundance was greater inside protected areas only for 11% of the species, but occurrence probability was higher inside protected areas for 44% of the species. Overall, we observed that species thermal affinity was a strong predictor for positive species response to temperature anomalies, and that species sharing similar phylogenetic history had similar relationships with environmental variables. Protection of large wetlands and restoration of the surrounding habitats are two targets for climate change adaptation strategies to facilitate future responses of waterbirds to climate warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]