Wagamaga OP t1_j9y3f1w wrote
Climate change isn’t the only threat facing California’s birds. Over the course of the 20th century, urban sprawl and agricultural development have dramatically changed the landscape of the state, forcing many native species to adapt to new and unfamiliar habitats.
In a new study, biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, use current and historical bird surveys to reveal how land use change has amplified — and in some cases mitigated — the impacts of climate change on bird populations in Los Angeles and the Central Valley.
The study found that urbanization and much hotter and drier conditions in L.A. have driven declines in more than one-third of bird species in the region over the past century. Meanwhile, agricultural development and a warmer and slightly wetter climate in the Central Valley have had more mixed impacts on biodiversity.
“It’s pretty common in studies of the impact of climate change on biodiversity to only model the effects of climate and not consider the effects of land use change,” said study senior author Steven Beissinger, a professor of environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley and a researcher at the campus’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ). “But we’re finding that the individual responses of different bird species to these threats are likely to promote unpredictable changes that complicate forecasts of extinction risk.”
The study, publishing today in the journal Science Advances, presents the latest results from UC Berkeley’s Grinnell Resurvey Project, an effort to revisit and document birds and small mammals at sites first surveyed a century ago by UC Berkeley professor Joseph Grinnell.
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