Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Center for Biodiversity and Global Change, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Nat Commun. 2020 Feb 18;11(1):801. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-14589-2.
Migration is a widespread response of birds to seasonally varying climates. As seasonality is particularly pronounced during interglacial periods, this raises the question of the significance of bird migration during past periods with different patterns of seasonality. Here, we apply a mechanistic model to climate reconstructions to simulate the past 50,000 years of bird migration worldwide, a period encompassing the transition between the last glacial period and the current interglacial. Our results indicate that bird migration was also a prevalent phenomenon during the last ice age, almost as much as today, suggesting that it has been continually important throughout the glacial cycles of recent Earth history. We find however regional variations, with increasing migratory activity in the Americas, which is not mirrored in the Old World. These results highlight the strong flexibility of the global bird migration system and offer a baseline in the context of on-going anthropogenic climate change.
迁徙是鸟类对季节性气候变化的广泛反应。由于在间冰期季节变化尤为明显，这就提出了在过去季节变化模式不同的时期鸟类迁徙的重要性问题。在这里，我们应用一种机制模型对气候重建进行模拟，以预测过去 5 万年全球鸟类迁徙的情况，这一时期涵盖了末次冰期向当前间冰期的转变。我们的研究结果表明，鸟类迁徙在上一个冰河时代也很普遍，几乎和今天一样，这表明它在最近地球历史的冰期循环中一直都很重要。然而，我们发现了一些区域差异，即美洲的迁徙活动增加，而在旧世界则没有这种情况。这些结果突出了全球鸟类迁徙系统的强大灵活性，并为正在进行的人为气候变化背景下提供了一个基准。
