Looking for compensation at multiple scales in a wetland bird community

Compensatory dynamics, during which community composition shifts despite a near-constant total community size, are usually rare: synchronous dynamics prevail in natural communities. This is a puzzle for ecologists, because of the key role of compensation in explaining the relation between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. However, most studies so far have considered compensation in either plants or planktonic organisms, so that evidence for the generality of such synchrony is limited. Here, we extend analyses of community-level synchrony to wetland birds. We analyse a 35-year monthly survey of a community where we suspected that compensation might occur due to potential competition and changes in water levels, favouring birds with different habitat preferences. We perform both year-to-year analyses by season, using a compensation/synchrony index, as well as multiscale analyses using a wavelet-based measure, which allows for both scale- and time-dependence. We analyse synchrony bot...