Anthropogenic bottom-up and top-down impacts on boreal breeding waterbirds.

ABSTRACT: Wetland habitats are changing under multiple anthropogenic pressures. Nutrient leakage and pollution modify physico-chemical state of wetlands and affect the ecosystem through bottom-up processes, while alien predators affect the ecosystems in a top-down manner. Boreal wetlands are important breeding areas for several waterbird species, the abundances of which potentially reflect both bottom-up and top-down ecosystem processes. Here, we use long-term national monitoring data gathered from c. 130 waterbird breeding sites in Finland from the 1980s to the 2020s. We hypothesised that the physico-chemical state of the waters and increasing alien predator abundance both play a role in steering the waterbird population trends. We set out to test this hypothesis by relating population changes of 1

SUBMITTER: Holopainen S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10925514 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature