Study finds impact of climate change on bird traits

A new study has found that climate change is majorly responsible for long-term trait changes in European birds.

However, climate change being responsible for long-term trait changes in European birds relies heavily on three conditions that are -- the local climate is changing, traits are sensitive to climate variability, and other drivers are not also changing over time.

The research work on the traits of 60 European bird species, including egg-laying date, offspring number, and body condition, discovered that approximately half of the magnitude of changes in the traits over recent decades can be attributed to rising mean temperatures, according to The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Apart from global warming, non-temperature factors also play a huge role in changing bird traits.The findings suggested that non-temperature factors, such as urbzation, can play a role and that variation in the extent of trait changes among species may be due to non-temperature factors rather than climate sensitivity differences.

Attributing temporal trends solely to warming thus overestimates the impact of warming. Furthermore, contributions from non-temperature drivers explained most of the interspecific variation in trait changes, raising concerns about comparative studies that attribute differences in temporal trends to species differences in climate-change sensitivity.

( With inputs from ANI )

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