Acoustic phenology among tropical resident birds differs between native
forest species and parkland colonizer species
Abstract
Most birds are characterized by a seasonal phenology closely adapted to
local climatic conditions, even in tropical habitats where climatic
seasonality is slight. In order to better understand the phenologies of
resident tropical birds, and how phenology may differ among species at
the same site, we used ~70,000 hours of audio recordings
collected continuously for two years at four recording stations in
Singapore and nine custom-made machine learning classifiers to determine
the vocal phenology of a panel of nine resident bird species. We
detected distinct seasonality in vocal activity in some species but not
others. Native forest species sang seasonally. In contrast, species
which have only had breeding populations in Singapore for the last few
decades exhibited seemingly aseasonal or unpredictable song activity
throughout the year. Urbanization and habitat modification over the last
200 years have altered the composition of species in Singapore, which
appears to have influenced phenological dynamics in the avian community.
It is unclear what is driving the differences in phenology between these
two groups of species, but it may be due to either differences in
seasonal availability of preferred foods, or newly established
populations may require decades to adjust to the local phenology. Our
results highlight the ways that anthropogenic habitat modification may
disrupt phenological cycles in tropical regions in addition to altering
the species community.