Species‐level correlates of land‐use responses and climate‐change sensitivity in terrestrial vertebrates

Abstract

AbstractLand‐use and climate change are major pressures on terrestrial biodiversity. Species’ extinction risk and responses to human pressures relate to ecological traits and other characteristics in some clades. However, large‐scale comparative assessments of the associations between traits and responses to multiple human pressures across multiple clades are needed. We investigated whether a set of ecological characteristics that are commonly measured across terrestrial vertebrates (ecological traits and geographic range area) are associated with species’ responses to different land‐use types and species’ likely sensitivity to climate change. We aimed to test whether generalizable patterns in response to these pressures arise across both pressures and across vertebrate clades, which could inform assessments of the global signature of human pressures on vertebrate biodiversity and guide conservation efforts. At the species level, we investigated associations between land‐use responses and ecological characteristics with a space‐for‐time substitution approach, making use of the PREDICTS database. We investigated associations between ecological characteristics and expected climate‐change sensitivity, estimated from properties of species realized climatic niches. Among the characteristics we considered, 3 were consistently associated with strong land‐use responses and high climate‐change sensitivity across terrestrial vertebrate classes: narrow geographic range, narrow habitat breadth, and specialization on natural habitats (which described whether a species occurs in artificial habitats or not). The associations of other traits with species’ land‐use responses and climate‐change sensitivity often depended on species’ class and land‐use type, highlighting an important degree of context dependency. In all classes, invertebrate eaters and fruit and nectar eaters tended to be negatively affected in disturbed land‐use types, whereas invertebrate‐eating and plant‐ and seed‐eating birds were estimated to be more sensitive to climate change, raising concerns about the continuation of ecological processes sustained by these species under global changes. Our results highlight a consistently higher sensitivity of narrowly distributed species and habitat specialists to land‐use and climate change, which provides support for capturing such characteristics in large‐scale vulnerability assessments.