Decline of the North American avifauna

By K. Rosenberg, A. Dokter, P. Blancher, John R. Sauer, Adam C. Smith, P. Smith, J. Stanton, A. Panjabi, Laura Helft, M. Parr and 1 more. Science, 2019

1,751 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Staggering decline of bird populations Because birds are conspicuous and easy to identify and count, reliable records of their occurrence have been gathered over many decades in many parts of the world. Drawing on such data for North America, Rosenberg et al. report wide-spread population declines of birds over the past half-century, resulting in the cumulative loss of billions of breeding individuals across a wide range of species and habitats. They show that declines are not restricted to rare and threatened species—those once considered common and wide-spread are also diminished. These results have major implications for ecosystem integrity, the conservation of wildlife more broadly, and policies associated with the protection of birds and native ecosystems on which they depend. Science, this issue p. 120 The cumulative loss of nearly 3 billion birds since 1970 across North American biomes signals a continuing avifaunal crisis. Species extinctions have defined the global biodiversity crisis, but extinction begins with loss in abundance of individuals that can result in compositional and functional changes of ecosystems. Using multiple and independent monitoring networks, we report population losses across much of the North American avifauna over 48 years, including once-common species and from most biomes. Integration of range-wide population trajectories and size estimates indicates a net loss approaching 3 billion birds, or 29% of 1970 abundance. A continent-wide weather radar network also reveals a similarly steep decline in biomass passage of migrating birds over a recent 10-year period. This loss of bird abundance signals an urgent need to address threats to avert future avifaunal collapse and associated loss of ecosystem integrity, function, and services.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3dd8f53ee85b8f085a4009c44190b4d8011d153

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Citations in the corpus

Biodiversity citizen science: Outcomes for the participating citizens (2021, background): “…numerous scientific publications based on data collected by citizens, for example, on birds (e.g. Callaghan et al., 2019; Pellisier et al., 2019; Rosenberg et al., 2019), insects (e.g. Deguines et al., 2012; Pellisier et al., 2019; Richardson et al., 2018), sea slugs (e.g. Nimbs & Smith, 2018)…”
Poor availability of context-specific evidence hampers decision-making in conservation (2020, background): “Given substantial declines of bird fauna (Rosenberg et al., 2019) and severe threats to amphibians (Grant, Muths, Schmidt, & Petrovan, 2019), a better understanding of the effectiveness of interventions targeting threatened species is urgently required.”
Comparing sample bias correction methods for species distribution modeling using virtual species (2021, background): “This has become essential for land managers who must respond to dramatic changes in species composition due to changing climates (Travis 2003, Rosenzweig et al. 2008, Butchart et al. 2010, Rosenberg et al. 2019).”