Identifying the relative contribution of climate change, land-use and alien species on community reshuffling

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I Wen Chen, Life Science, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan and I-Ching Chen, Life Sciences, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan

Background/Question/Methods
Global biodiversity has undergone dramatic compositional change even the richness and abundance remain identical. Climate change, land use, and alien species have been identified as the major drivers of composition reshuffling. However, their relative contribution and its spatial heterogeneity remain elusive. We addressed this issue by looking at how the breeding bird communities in Taiwan have been reshuffled for the past decade. Firstly, we quantified the compositional change by the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity index and separated the site-specific contribution to dissimilarity by identifying driver associated species, namely climate (i.e., temperature and precipitation) associated species, land-use associated species (exploiters in human-modified land), and alien species.
Results/Conclusions
Communities were mainly reshaped by climate associated species (the mean of relative contribution of climate is 37.5%) across habitat types, but the effects were more pronounced in forest habitats (42.2%). The exploiters played a second place (25.3%) and the half of its contribution came from climate associated species (10.9%). Climate change were important driver even in human-dominate habitats. Most exploiters were negatively affected by current climate change due to higher precipitation. Moreover, alien species were largely exploiters and half of them are associated with climate change. We emphasized that habitat conversion likely altered the association between community and major climate drivers, and the site-specific drivers are important for local management and conservation.