Almost Seven Decades of Coastal Bird Community Recovery Across Three European Seas.

ABSTRACT: Marine ecosystems have been historically impacted by human activities, leading to significant declines in biodiversity. Despite conservation efforts and the establishment of protected areas over recent decades, many marine species remain threatened. Here, we used a large-scale database of 308 time series of coastal bird communities collected between 1957 and 2024 across three European regional seas to assess how abundance, taxonomic and functional diversity have changed over the past decades, and to evaluate the effect of conservation areas on coastal bird communities. Our results showed overall increases in taxonomic richness (1.7% per year on average), taxonomic diversity (1.4%), abundance (2.7%), functional richness (4.1%) and functional evenness (0.7%) of coastal bird communities. Alth

SUBMITTER: Cano-Barbacil C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12648369 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature