Essential Site Maintenance: Authorea-powered sites will be updated circa 15:00-17:00 Eastern on Tuesday 5 November.
There should be no interruption to normal services, but please contact us at [email protected] in case you face any issues.

loading page

Species associations in common bird communities are declining
  • +1
  • Stanislas Rigal,
  • Vincent Devictor,
  • Pierre Gaüzère,
  • Vasilis Dakos
Stanislas Rigal
Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

Author Profile
Vincent Devictor
Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier
Author Profile
Pierre Gaüzère
Université Grenoble Alpes
Author Profile
Vasilis Dakos
Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier
Author Profile

Abstract

As the state of biodiversity worsens, the dynamics of species interactions is a growing conservation concern. However, estimating and monitoring species interactions across large spatial and temporal scales remain challenging. Here, we assess changes in the number and type of pairwise associations using large-scale spatial and temporal data on the French avifauna. We estimate species associations through space and time for 109 species monitored across 1,969 sites during 17 years, and we show their ecological significance by testing their relationships with species functional proximity or shared habitat preference. We finally track temporal changes in reconstructed association networks. We show that birds' local association networks were less and less connected through the study period. This decrease in network connectance does not similarly affect the different types of species associations. Overall, we show that large-scale temporal monitoring of species association networks can reveal overlooked consequences on how communities can cope with global change.