Annual temperature variation influences the vulnerability of montane bird communities to land-use change

Understanding how and why species respond to land-use change is one of the central challenges in conservation biology, yet the causes of variation in the responses of species to land-use change remain unclear. We tested whether adaptation to different abiotic environments influenced the vulnerability of bird communities to agricultural expansion in the Himalayan mountain range, which exhibits a strong east-west gradient in annual temperature variation. We did so by surveying bird communities in forest and agriculture at opposite ends of that gradient. We contrasted metrics of species richness, diversity, community composition, and forest dependency for species across land-use types and regions, and tested whether species’ thermal sensitivity influenced their response to the replacement of forest with agriculture. Agricultural land in the relatively aseasonal east harboured significantly fewer bird species than did forests, a pattern that is starkly reversed in the highly seasonal west. ...