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Neighbourhood threats: landscape context and anthropogenic changes can trigger waterbird population collapse

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Abstract

Context

Global biodiversity decreases rapidly, driven by various factors ranging from climate change to anthropogenic activities. Identifying driving forces of population decline is critical for biological conservation. Time-series data are especially valuable for this goal, but unfortunately, high-quality time-series data are generally lacking, hampering evidences-based conservation policy making.

Objectives

In this study, we examined how population growth rates of wintering waterbird species changed across 34 years (1986–2019) in response to changes in landscape context, climatic, ecological and anthropogenic factors in the Yangtze River Floodplain. Specifically: we aimed to (1) understand the factors that are correlated with the population trend of each waterbird species, and (2) identify the spatial scale at which each waterbird species responds to surrounding landscape changes.

Methods

We systemically collected wintering survey data from 1986 to 2019 in Shengjin Lake National Nature Reserve for six waterbird species including Oriental stork (Ciconia boyciana), Eurasian spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia), Tundra swan (Cygnus columbianus), Swan goose (Anser cygnoid), Hooded crane (Grus monacha) and White-naped crane (Grus vipio), coupled with climatic and anthropogenic data. Satellite images were analyzed to characterize ecological variables and landscape context (both in landscape and class levels).

Results

Our results suggested that anthropogenic landscape changes surrounding wetland habitats (i.e., landscape context) acted as the primary factors driving the waterbird population changes and were responsible for the observed population declines. In particular, increasing built-up areas and decreasing cropland areas associated with urbanization and human settlement expansion largely explained the declining population size. Our results also showed that different variables operated at a different scale of the landscape context, highlighting the importance of the surrounding landscape configuration at both small and larger scales, as built-up area was most important at around 8 km for most of the studied species, but cropland area expansion benefitted the two crane species at a larger spatial extent. The fishing ban policy implemented in 2017 provides an opportunity for reversing such declines, as positive effects of reduced human activities were observed in a portion of waterbird species.

Conclusions

The demonstrated strong effects of landscape context on wetland biodiversity illustrated that practical mitigating measures can increase conservation success if they not only target the wetland habitats per se but also include the surrounding non-wetland areas at larger spatial scales.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We want to acknowledge the late Mark Barter, Meijuan Zhao, Qiang Jia, Yuzhan Yang, Yan Chen and Qing Zhu for helping us to carry out the waterbirds census.

Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42271116) and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. BK20170922).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Co-Innovation Center for Sustainable Forestry in Southern China, College of Biology and the Environment, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, 210037, China

    Sheng Chen, Yong Zhang, Bin J. W. Chen & Changhu Lu

  2. School of Life Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Chi Xu

  3. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 18 Shuangqing Road, Beijing, 100085, China

    Lei Cao

  4. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 19 Yuquan Road, Shijingshan District, Beijing, 100049, China

    Lei Cao

  5. College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210046, China

    Zheng Y. X. Huang

  6. School of Resources and Environmental Engineering, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601, China

    Chunlin Li

  7. Anhui Shengjin Lake National Nature Reserve, Dongzhi, 247200, China

    Wenbin Xu & Yunwei Song

  8. Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Group, Wageningen University, Droevendaalsesteeg 3a, 6708PB, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Willem Frederik de Boer

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  1. Sheng Chen
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  2. Yong Zhang
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  3. Chi Xu
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  11. Willem Frederik de Boer
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by SC, YZ and LC. The first draft of the manuscript was written by SC and YZ, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yong Zhang.

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Chen, S., Zhang, Y., Xu, C. et al. Neighbourhood threats: landscape context and anthropogenic changes can trigger waterbird population collapse. Landsc Ecol 37, 3141–3158 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-022-01518-5

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