RT Journal Article
T1 Cascading effects of climate variability on the breeding success of an edge population of an apex predator
A1 Gangoso De La Colina, Laura Esther
A1 Viana, Duarte S.
A1 Dokter, Adriaan M.
A1 Shamoun‐Baranes, Judy
A1 Figuerola, Jordi
A1 Barbosa, Sergio A.
A1 Bouten, Willem
A2 Annette Fayet, 
AB Large-scale environmental forces can influence biodiversity at different levels of biological organization. Climate, in particular, is often associated with species distributions and diversity gradients. However, its mechanistic link to population dynamics is still poorly understood.Here, we unravelled the full mechanistic path by which a climatic driver, the Atlantic trade winds, determines the viability of a bird population.We monitored the breeding population of Eleonora's falcons in the Canary Islands for over a decade (2007–2017) and integrated different methods and data to reconstruct how the availability of their prey (migratory birds) is regulated by trade winds. We tracked foraging movements of breeding adults using GPS, monitored departure of migratory birds using weather radar and simulated their migration trajectories using an individual-based, spatially explicit model.We demonstrate that regional easterly winds regulate the flux of migratory birds that is available to hunting falcons, determining food availability for their chicks and consequent breeding success. By reconstructing how migratory birds are pushed towards the Canary Islands by trade winds, we explain most of the variation (up to 86%) in annual productivity for over a decade.This study unequivocally illustrates how a climatic driver can influence local-scale demographic processes while providing novel evidence of wind as a major determinant of population fitness in a top predator.
PB John Wiley & Sons Ltd / British Ecological Society
SN 0021-8790
YR 2020
FD 2020
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/110718
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/110718
LA eng
NO Gangoso L, Viana DS, Dokter AM,et al. Cascading effects of climate variability on the breedingsuccess of an edge population of an apex predator. J Anim Ecol.2020;89:2631–2643. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13304
NO The study was partly funded by the Cabildo de Lanzarote, European Social Fund, and adaptation and improvement of the internationalization of e-infrastructure of the ICTS-RBD for the ESFRI-LifeWatch. UvA-BiTS studies are facilitated by infrastructures for e-Ecology, developed with the support of LifeWatch and conducted on the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of SURF Cooperative. While writing this manuscript, L.G. was supported by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Commission (grant number 747729, ‘EcoEvoClim’).
NO Cabildo de Lanzarote
NO ESFRI-LifeWatch
NO European Commission
NO LifeWatch
DS Docta Complutense
RD 9 abr 2025