Bird communities in the Swiss Alps, 1999-2018, abundance data

Aim: Mountains are biodiversity hotspots and are among the most sensitive eco- systems to ongoing global change being thus of conservation concern. Under this scenario, assessing how biological communities vary over time along elevational gra- dients and the relative effects of niche-based deterministic processes and stochastic events in structuring assemblages is essential. Here, we examined how the temporal trends of bird communities vary with elevation over a 20 year-period (1999–2018). We also tested for differences in temporal dynamics among habitat types (among-community variability) and functional groups (within-community variability).

Taxon: 97 species of common breeding birds.

Location: Swiss Alps.

Methods: We used abundance data from the Swiss breeding bird survey to compute different temporal dynamic metrics (temporal turnover, synchrony, rate of community change and community-level of covariance among species). We also examined the relative contribution of determini...