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 ...土地利用变化（land use changes）是对生物多样性（biodiversity）最严峻的威胁之一，但全球广袤区域的数据匮乏阻碍了对其生态影响的评估。对于鸟类而言，土地利用变化可能引发栖息地丧失或破碎化、资源可获得性改变，以及生物相互作用（biotic interactions）或扩散路径（dispersal pathways）的破坏。因此，全球范围内受城市化、农业集约化（agricultural intensification）与土地撂荒（land abandonment）影响的区域，鸟类种群数量与群落多样性（assemblage diversity）均出现下降。这一威胁在诸如地中海盆地（Mediterranean basin）这类生物多样性热点区域尤为突出：该区域汇聚了多种生物地理起源的鸟类区系（avifaunas），包含大量对栖息地改变恢复力较弱的特有类群（endemic taxa）与生态特化物种（ecological specialists）。本研究将鸟类分类多样性（taxonomic diversity）与功能多样性（functional diversity）的多个维度与细粒度土地利用变化分类体系进行关联，以期从保护视角识别需要开展规范化强制性鸟类采样的优先区域。为此，我们计算了……