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Climate change has been associated with both latitudinal and elevational shifts in species' ranges. The extent, however, to which climate change has driven recent range shifts alongside other putative drivers remains uncertain. Here, we use the changing distributions of 378 European breeding bird species over 30 years to explore the putative drivers of recent range dynamics, considering the effects of climate, land cover, other environmental variables, and species' traits on the probability of local colonisation and extinction. On average, species shifted their ranges by 2.4 km/year. These shifts, however, were significantly different from expectations due to changing climate and land cover. We found that local colonisation and extinction events were influenced primarily by initial climate conditions and by species' range traits. By contrast, changes in climate suitability over the period were less important. This highlights the limitations of using only climate and land cover when projecting future changes in species' ranges and emphasises the need for integrative, multi-predictor approaches for more robust forecasting., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Fire is a fundamental process in savannas and is widely used for management. Pyrodiversity, variation in local fire characteristics, has been proposed as a driver of biodiversity although empirical evidence is equivocal. Using a new measure of pyrodiversity (Hempson et al.), we undertook the first continent-wide assessment of how pyrodiversity affects biodiversity in protected areas across African savannas. The influence of pyrodiversity on bird and mammal species richness varied with rainfall: strongest support for a positive effect occurred in wet savannas (> 650 mm/year), where species richness increased by 27% for mammals and 40% for birds in the most pyrodiverse regions. Range-restricted birds were most increased by pyrodiversity, suggesting the diversity of fire regimes increases the availability of rare niches. Our findings are significant because they explain the conflicting results found in previous studies of savannas. We argue that managing savanna landscapes to increase pyrodiversity is especially important in wet savannas., (© 2018 The Authors. Ecology Letters published by CNRS and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

The extent to which climate change might diminish the efficacy of protected areas is one of the most pressing conservation questions. Many projections suggest that climate-driven species distribution shifts will leave protected areas impoverished and species inadequately protected while other evidence suggests that intact ecosystems within protected areas will be resilient to change. Here, we tackle this problem empirically. We show how recent changes in distribution of 139 Tanzanian savannah bird species are linked to climate change, protected area status and land degradation. We provide the first evidence of climate-driven range shifts for an African bird community. Our results suggest that the continued maintenance of existing protected areas is an appropriate conservation response to the challenge of climate and environmental change., (© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/CNRS.)

Understanding functional relationships within ecological networks can help reveal keys to ecosystem stability or fragility. Revealing these relationships is complicated by the difficulties of isolating variables or performing experimental manipulations within a natural ecosystem, and thus inferences are often made by matching models to observational data. Such models, however, require assumptions-or detailed measurements-of parameters such as birth and death rate, encounter frequency, territorial exclusion, and predation success. Here, we evaluate the use of a Bayesian network inference algorithm, which can reveal ecological networks based upon species and habitat abundance alone. We test the algorithm's performance and applicability on observational data of avian communities and habitat in the Peak District National Park, United Kingdom. The resulting networks correctly reveal known relationships among habitat types and known interspecific relationships. In addition, the networks produced novel insights into ecosystem structure and identified key species with high connectivity. Thus, Bayesian networks show potential for becoming a valuable tool in ecosystem analysis.

Predicting how species distributions might shift as global climate changes is fundamental to the successful adaptation of conservation policy. An increasing number of studies have responded to this challenge by using climate envelopes, modeling the association between climate variables and species distributions. However, it is difficult to quantify how well species actually match climate. Here, we use null models to show that species-climate associations found by climate envelope methods are no better than chance for 68 of 100 European bird species. In line with predictions, we demonstrate that the species with distribution limits determined by climate have more northerly ranges. We conclude that scientific studies and climate change adaptation policies based on the indiscriminate use of climate envelope methods irrespective of species sensitivity to climate may be misleading and in need of revision.