Shifting Seasons: Long‐Term Insights Into Climate Change Effects on Bird Phenology From Ringing Data

Hinchcliffe, DL ORCID: 0000-0001-5204-5161 and Tkaczynski, PJ ORCID: 0000-0003-3207-2132 (2025) Shifting Seasons: Long‐Term Insights Into Climate Change Effects on Bird Phenology From Ringing Data. Ecology and Evolution, 15 (10). e72317-e72317. ISSN 2045-7758

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Abstract

Understanding how animal communities respond to environmental change is crucial for predicting biodiversity trends. Birds, particularly migratory species and those experiencing large‐scale declines, are sensitive to shifting climatic conditions. Environmental stressors have been linked to earlier migration timing, which can alter species abundance and disrupt ecological interactions. Long‐term population monitoring provides essential insights into species' capacity to adapt to climate change, offering a predictive framework for assessing their future viability. We analyse a 25‐year bird ringing dataset from Spurn Bird Observatory located at a notable migratory bird hotspot in the UK. We show that climate factors, especially temperature, are significantly changing and consequently impact migrant bird arrival times. We also show that different species' abundances are changing over time and make a weak but notable association between these trends with climate change. When species are analysed in isolation, it is clear there are other potential contributing factors which may explain variation in abundance at Spurn over the years—to fully understand these changes, species must be studied in an ecological context, including multi‐species analyses. We take care to control for catching effort in our analyses, as we find that this directly correlates with both abundance and diversity of species caught, which demonstrates the importance of year‐round standardised ringing coverage at UK biodiversity hotspots. As such, we suggest caution when using ringing data to make ecological interpretations. While citizen science ringing data has limitations that restrict its use for elucidating mechanisms of species‐level patterns, it remains a vital tool for informing conservation. Our study highlights the value of sustained ecological datasets in tracking these dynamics and informing conservation strategies across taxa for habitat and landscape‐level management.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	0602 Ecology; 0603 Evolutionary Biology; 3103 Ecology; 3104 Evolutionary biology; 4102 Ecological applications
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences Q Science > QH Natural history > QH301 Biology S Agriculture > SF Animal culture
Divisions:	Biological and Environmental Sciences (from Sep 19)
Publisher:	Wiley
Date of acceptance:	29 September 2025
Date of first compliant Open Access:	13 October 2025
Date Deposited:	13 Oct 2025 09:46
Last Modified:	13 Oct 2025 10:00
DOI or ID number:	10.1002/ece3.72317
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27316

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