When Common Birds Became Rare: Historical Records Shed Light on Long-Term Responses of Bird Communities to Global Change in the Largest Wetland of France.

ABSTRACT: Many species have suffered large population declines due to the anthropogenic influence on ecosystems. Understanding historical population trends is essential for informing best efforts to preserve species. We propose a new method to reconstruct the past structure of a regional species pool, based on historical naturalist literature. Qualitative information collected from annotated checklists and reports can be relevant to identify major long-term community changes. We reviewed ornithological literature on the Camargue, the largest wetland in France. We reconstructed the entire breeding bird community from 1830 to 2009 and translated historical data into semi-quantitative data. This data permitted a calculation of a Community Commonness Index to measure the average level of abundance of sp

SUBMITTER: Galewski T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5104452 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature