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Grassland birds in North America have declined sharply over the last 60 years, driven by the widespread loss and degradation of grassland habitats. Climate change is occurring more rapidly in grasslands relative to some other ecosystems, and exposure to extreme and novel climate conditions may affect grassland bird ecology and demographics. To determine the potential effects of weather and climate variability on grassland birds, we conducted a systematic review of relationships between temperature and precipitation and demographic responses in grassland bird species of North America. Based on 124 independent studies, we used a vote-counting approach to quantify the frequency and direction of significant effects...
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Abstract: Grassland birds are declining faster than any other bird guild across North America. Shrinking ranges and population declines are attributed to widespread habitat loss and increasingly fragmented landscapes of agriculture and other land uses that are misaligned with grassland bird conservation. Concurrent with habitat loss and degradation, temperate grasslands have been disproportionally affected by climate change relative to most other terrestrial biomes. Distributions of grassland birds often correlate with gradients in climate, but few researchers have explored the consequences of weather on the demography of grassland birds inhabiting a range of grassland fragments. To do so, we modeled the effects...
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Abstract (from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10980-017-0487-x): Context Temperate grasslands and their dependent species are exposed to high variability in weather and climate due to the lack of natural buffers such as forests. Grassland birds are particularly vulnerable to this variability, yet have failed to shift poleward in response to recent climate change like other bird species in North America. However, there have been few studies examining the effect of weather on grassland bird demography and consequent influence of climate change on population persistence and distributional shifts. Objectives The goal of this study was to estimate the vulnerability of Henslow’s Sparrow (Ammodramus henslowii),...
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