A habitat quality indicator for common birds in Europe based on species distribution models

The EU 2020 Biodiversity Strategy requires gathering biodiversity information to monitor progress towards reaching its main targets. Common species are good proxies for the diversity and integrity of ecosystems, since they are key elements of the biomass, structure, function and services of ecosystems. In this sense, we aimed to develop a spatially-explicit indicator of habitat quality (HQI) at European level based on the species included in the European Common Bird Index, also disaggregated into major habitat types (farmland and forest). Using species occurrences from the European Breeding Birds Atlas (at 50x50 km cell size) and the maximum entropy algorithm, we derived species distribution maps using a novel approach to refine occurrence data based on species ecology. This allowed us coping with the limitations arising from modelling common and widespread species, obtaining habitat suitability maps for each species at smaller spatial resolution (10x10 km grid), which provided higher model accuracy than when using the original occurrence data at coarser scale. Analysis of the spatial patterns of local and relative species richness (i.e. defined as the ratio between species richness in a given location and the average richness in the regional context) for the common birds analysed demonstrated that the development of a HQI based on species richness needs to account for the regional species pool in order to make objective comparisons between regions. In this way, we proved that relative species richness compensated the bias caused by the inherent heterogeneous patterns of the species distributions that was yielding larger local species richness in areas where most of the target species have the core of their distribution range. The method presented in this study provides a robust indicator of habitat quality to make comparisons between regions at European scale, becoming a useful and innovative tool that might be useful to measure the progress towards the targets of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. Finally, since species distribution models are based on breeding birds the HQI can be also interpreted as a surrogate for the capacity of ecosystems to provide and maintain nursery/reproductive habitats for terrestrial species, a key maintenance and regulation ecosystem services.

VALLECILLO RODRIGUEZ Sara;  MAES Joachim;  POLCE Chiara;  LAVALLE Carlo; 

2016-06-10

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

JRC98383

1470-160X,   

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X16302412,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC98383,   

10.1016/j.ecolind.2016.05.008,