Task 4.3

| Leader | – | Key words | – | Presentation | – | Work plan | – | Involved teams |

Task 4.3: Common bird communities in areas with desirable and undesirable bundles of ecosystem services

| Leader |
jiguet
Frédéric Jiguet
| MNHN CERSP |

| Key words |


| Presentation |

The objective of this task will be to explore the extent to which common bird communities can predict diversified sets of ecosystem services. Our main hypothesis predicts that regions with a healthy ecosystem state will be characterised by high species diversity and/or a balanced trophic community. Conversely, we expect that regions with degraded ecosystem states will harbour simplified bird communities. First, we will focus on a community of 100 common bird species (classified as farmland specialists, generalists, and forest specialists by the European Bird Census Council) to develop a set of integrative multiple-species indicators. Building on expertise from our research consortium that conducts biodiversity analyses, we will use the most advanced methodology and concepts for the development of indicators that can be used at the bird community level. These indicators will be developed similar to the specialisation index of Julliard et al. (2006), but we will use species-specific metrics (i.e., functional traits of species will be used as proxies for different types of ecosystem services). We will then study how these ecosystem service indicators are related to the farmland bird index, the community specialisation index, and the trophic index. Finally, we will compare the values of the bird community indicators across the different types of bundles (established in task 4.2) to reveal which bird community indicators are the best predictors of ecosystem service bundles.


| Involved teams |