Variation and correlation in the timing of breeding of North Atlantic seabirds across multiple scales

Timing of breeding, an important driver of fitness in many populations, is widely studied in the context of global change, yet despite considerable efforts to identify environmental drivers of seabird nesting phenology, for most populations we lack evidence of strong drivers. Here we adopt an alternative approach, examining the degree to which different populations positively covary in their annual phenology to infer whether phenological responses to environmental drivers are likely to be (i) shared across species at a range of spatial scales, (ii) shared across populations of a species, or (iii) idiosyncratic to populations.
We combined 51 long-term datasets on breeding phenology spanning 50 years from nine seabird species across 29 North Atlantic sites and examined the extent to which different populations share early versus late breeding seasons depending on a hierarchy of spatial scales comprising breeding site, small-scale region, large-scale region and the whole North Atlantic.
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繁殖时序作为诸多种群适合度的核心驱动因子之一，在全球变化研究框架下得到了广泛探讨。尽管学界已付出诸多努力以探明海鸟筑巢物候的环境驱动因子，但绝大多数种群仍缺乏强有力的驱动证据。
本研究采用一种替代性研究思路：通过分析不同种群年度物候的正共变程度，推断其对环境驱动因子的物候响应模式更可能属于以下三类中的哪一种：(i) 在一系列空间尺度上跨物种共享；(ii) 同一物种的不同种群间共享；(iii) 种群专属的特有模式。
本研究整合了横跨北大西洋29个观测位点、涵盖9种海鸟、时长50年的51套繁殖物候长期数据集，并基于繁殖位点、小尺度区域、大尺度区域及整个北大西洋的空间尺度层级，分析不同种群在繁殖季早晚特征上的共享程度。
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