The Universitat leads a National Network for the study of the impacts of global warming on bird populations

The research on biodiversity’s reaction mechanisms to global warming is essential to be able to predict future scenarios and plan viable solutions.

Birds are, within terrestrial eukaryotes, one of the zoological groups that are more used as climate change indicators, since it allows the long-term monitoring of population, sometimes even using marked individuals. In particular, the group of species that use natural cavities for reproduction (cavity-nesting birds), many of which accept nest boxes quite well, have been models of study because of how easy is it to take data about the reproduction process and carrying out experiments in field conditions, which have helped to establish cause-effect relations with more clarity.

The researchers who form the Network aim at studying the interaction between sexual selection and population dynamics (demography), under different environment scenarios that could produce local adaptation (divergent selection) in species that are ecologically close, an approximation that is not usually large-scale approached. To face this challenge, it is necessary to coordinate specialists in different disciplines (bird singing, plumage colouration, immunity, parasitism, etc.) who work with coordinate methodologies and common objectives and starting hypothesis, in similar species but different environments. For this, the area of the Mediterranean offers a great variability in environmental conditions, which allows carrying out these studies in an efficient way.

The Network’s members are competent to approach the multiple faces that derive from these objectives. This way, they have studied different secondary sexual signs (male’s song, colouration based on carotenes or melanin, size of different parts of the plumage, etc.), various indicators of the parental inversion in reproduction (incubation, feeding rates and preys given to chicks, etc.) and the quality of the individuals (immune capacity, prevalence of parasites, etc.); and have considerate different motors of global change (climate, fragmentation, urbanisation, etc.).

Thanks to MINECO’s financing, CRONOBIRD will organise sessions on the topic of the Network, will carry out workshops in order for the members of the Network to improve their competencies in different techniques, and will celebrate dissemination seminars on the impacts of the global warming on bird populations and the contributions of the scientific studies in the search for solutions. The Network will also promote the collaboration between the research groups that form it, both in research projects and use of data and students training, among other action lines.

The CRONOBIRD Network for Excellence is an initiative by the researchers Emilio Barba (ICBiBE, Universitat de València), Juan José Sanz, Santiago Merino, Diego Gil and Juan Antonio Fargallo (National Museum of Natural History, CSIC), Juan Carlos Senar (Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona), Eduardo Jorge Belda (Universitat Politècnica de València), Ismael Galván (Doñana Biological Station, CSIC), and Gregorio Moreno-Rueda (University of Granada).

More information on the CRONOBIRD Network’s website: http://www.cronobird.es/