Diversity and Stability of Bird Communities in Türkiye and Europe

Date

2025-3-5

Author

Özgencil, İbrahim Kaan

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Biodiversity is essential for functioning of ecosystems and human existence. However, human activities have driven an unparalleled loss of biodiversity globally. Despite their ecological importance, birds are among the most impacted organisms, with 12% of all species facing extinction. In this thesis, I adopted a trait-based approach and used breeding bird atlases alongside generalized linear mixed-effect and spatial error models to examine (i) how extensive wetland degradation in central Türkiye has altered diversity of breeding wetland bird communities across spatial scales (ii) the extrinsic and intrinsic factors driving the temporal stability of breeding bird communities in Europe. Results showed that the decline in functional diversity of wetland birds in central Türkiye was stronger than taxonomic declines, with widespread species losses making communities taxonomically and functionally more heterogenous in space. Additionally, advancing seasonal shrinking/drying of wetlands likely threatens late-breeding endangered wetland birds in the region. Analyses concerning the community stability of European breeding bird communities revealed that extrinsic factors such as mean elevation, proportion of protected areas, biome coverage, and climate change significantly influenced taxonomic and functional stability. Communities with taxonomically or functionally similar neighbors remained more stable. Several intrinsic factors, including species richness and specific aspects of functional diversity, including redundancy, were also significantly associated community stability. The findings presented in this thesis can help guide conservation efforts, provide insight into the factors shaping stability of bird communities, and establish a foundation for future studies aiming at predicting vulnerability of communities to compositional and functional changes.

Subject Keywords

Climate change, Community stability, Functional diversity, Wetland birds, Biodiversity

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/114205

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis