Land-use change interacts with island biogeography to alter bird community assembly

• Published in: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
• Main Authors: Zhao, Yuhao, Mendenhall, Chase D., Matthews, Thomas J., Wang, Duorun, Li, Wande, Liu, Xiangxu, Tang, Shupei, Han, Peng, Wei, Guangpeng, Kang, Yi, Wu, Chenxiao, Wang, Rui, Zeng, Di, Frishkoff, Luke O., Si, Xingfeng
• Other Authors: Ministry of Natural Resources, Program for Professor of Special Appointment, National Nature Science Foundation of China, Technology Innovation Center for Land Spatial Eco-restoration
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: The Royal Society 2024
• Subjects: Close Islands
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.2245; https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2023.2245; https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full-xml/10.1098/rspb.2023.2245

Anthropogenic activities have reshaped biodiversity on islands worldwide. However, it remains unclear how island attributes and land-use change interactively shape multiple facets of island biodiversity through community assembly processes. To answer this, we conducted bird surveys in various land-use types (mainly forest and farmland) using transects on 34 oceanic land-bridge islands in the largest archipelago of China. We found that bird species richness increased with island area and decreased with isolation, regardless of the intensity of land-use change. However, forest-dominated habitats exhibited lower richness than farmland-dominated habitats. Island bird assemblages generally comprised species that share more similar traits or evolutionary histories (i.e. functional and/or phylogenetic clustering) than expected if assemblages were randomly assembled. Contrary to our expectations, we observed that bird assemblages in forest-dominated habitats were more clustered on large and close islands, whereas assemblages in farmland-dominated habitats were more clustered on small islands. These contrasting results indicate that land-use change interacts with island biogeography to alter the community assembly of birds on inhabited islands. Our findings emphasize the importance of incorporating human-modified habitats when examining the community assembly of island biota, and further suggest that agricultural landscapes on large islands may play essential roles in protecting countryside island biodiversity.