Abstract
Avian communities play a pivotal role in Arctic ecosystems and birds have become the key model taxa for climate change research. Due to funding priorities, Arctic passerines have been studied less intensively than waterfowl and shorebirds. In our study, we aim to partly fill this gap and look at the change in passerine community species composition in the Chaun River Delta in Northeast Siberia (68.81° N, 170.62° E) between 1970–1980 and 2002–2019. We restricted our comparison to 16 tundra-dwelling species associated with grass and shrub tundra habitats. During the first period, 12 passerine species were reported and by the end of the last period, 14 species. Our observations show that four species of shrub-dwelling passerines, the Dusky Warbler (Phylloscopus fuscatus), two species of Turdus thrushes, and the Siberian Rubythroat (Calliope calliope), have joined the local community. Additionally, one Turdus thrush species increased in numbers. The only passerine species that used to be common in the 70’s and rare in the 2000s is the Lapland Bunting (Calcarius lapponicus). Yellow-breasted Bunting (Emberiza aureola, vagrant in 70’s) and Siberian Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus tristis, rare breeder in 70’s) have not been recorded during the most recent period. At the same time, there was no observed change in abundance for eight species of songbirds. The results of supervised satellite image classification did not detect any local-scale increase of shrub cover in our study site. However, a broad-scale assessment of vegetation change using NDVI suggests substantial greening or ‘shrubification’ across the region. We speculate that it promotes region-wide increases and range expansion of some shrub-dwelling species, recorded in our study.
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Acknowledgements
We are thankful to our field assistants Ekaterina Matsyna, Elisabeth Goodrick, Andrey Averin, and Anastasia Myl’nikova for their work. Rebekah Smith, Birgita Hansen, and Heather Renner kindly corrected the English in the manuscript and improved the earlier versions. Comments and suggestions from Alexander Kondratyev, Erica Nol, Darroch Whitaker, and two anonymous reviewers helped to improve the earlier versions of the manuscript. Uma Bhatt kindly provided a modified image of Max NDVI trends for our study region. Chukotka Gold Mining Co, a subsidiary of Kinross Gold, provided logistic and transportation support.
Funding
Funding was provided by Institute of Biological Problems of the North FEB RAS (Registered research project АААА-А17-117122790002- 8). KS and HR were supported by National Geographic young explorer grant (WW-034ER-17).
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PK took part in the data collection, wrote the first, and compiled all the later drafts of the manuscript. DS initiated and supervised the project. SI, EK, HR, KS contributed by data collection. OK performed the GIS analysis, created all the maps, and contributed to the writing of the first and later drafts. All authors discussed the outcome of the results and provided comments on the draft. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. No permission is needed to trap and band non-Red Data Book species in Russia, according to the Federal Law for the Animal Kingdom, and all species trapped in the study site are not Red-List species.
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We compared the passerine community in a site in Northeastern Siberia between 1974-1984 with that of 2002-2019. Shrub-dwelling passerines: one leaf warbler, two thrushes, and one chat species have joined the local community. It is likely that the observed colonization patterns are a result of tundra ’shrubification’ in a wide spatial scale triggering range expansion of shrub-dwelling species in the Arctic tundra zone.
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300_2021_2915_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
Online resource 1. Verification of the classification resulted in the use of very high-resolution Google Maps image from 06/19/2006. Red lines indicate manually drawn areas that we could identify as somewhat covered by shrubs, containing several single standing rather tall specimens and with areas completely covered with tall or low shrub-looking vegetation. Yellow dots (3a) indicate 25 randomly generated points within the created polygons and 15 m buffers around each to compensate for the resolution difference, green pixels (3b) indicate territories classified as shrub from Landsat 5 1996, and blue pixels (3c) are shrub from Landsat 8 2018. Online resource 2. Confusion matrix. Online resource 3. A fragment of the unclassified Landsat 8 image (18 October 2018, band combination 5-4-3 where the intensive red color represents high vegetation biomass, mostly shrubs, and the blue color is snow). The manually digitized borders of the river bed position in 1995 and 2018 show a difference (2-4 pixel=60-120m) in the location of river banks and braid bars between the two time periods. Online resource 4. The result of Maximum likelihood classification with the cover of tall shrubs shown in red for 1995, green for 2006, and blue for 2018. The background satellite image is from October 2018, band combination 5-4-3 where the intensive red color represents high vegetation biomass, mostly shrubs, and the blue color is snow, and clip extent is based on the cloudless part of the image from September 1995. The black rectangle shows the area of the insert map, which reflects the area in the study site with the most intensive tall shrub cover increase. (PDF 953 kb)
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Ktitorov, P., Ivanov, S., Kornilova, E. et al. Shrub-dwelling species are joining the Arctic passerine bird community in the Chaun Delta (Western Chukotka, Russia). Polar Biol 44, 1847–1857 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-021-02915-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-021-02915-3