Land use changes threaten bird taxonomic and functional diversity across the Mediterranean basin: a spatial analysis to prioritize monitoring for conservation

Land use changes rank among the highest threats to biodiversity, but assessment of their ecological impact is impaired by data paucity in vast regions of the world. For birds, land use changes may mean habitat loss or fragmentation, changes in resource availability and disruption of biotic interactions or dispersal pathways. As a result, avian population sizes and assemblage diversity decline in areas subjected to urbanization, agricultural intensification and land abandonment worldwide. This threat is especially sensitive in hotspots such as the Mediterranean basin, where avifaunas of several biogeographic origins meet, encompassing numerous endemic taxa and ecological specialists with low resilience to habitat modifications. Here, we correlated several facets of bird taxonomic and functional diversity to a fine-grained land-use change classification, in order to identify priority areas in need for enforced protocoled bird sampling in a conservation prospect. For this, we computed the ...