Bird vulnerability to climate and land use changes in the Brazilian Cerrado

Abstract

Estimating species vulnerability to global changes and understanding what drives their vulnerability has become an important task in the last decades. Here, we evaluated the vulnerability of Cerrado bird species to climate and land use changes projected to take place up to 2050, compared our vulnerability estimates to the national red list of threatened species, and evaluated the level of protection of vulnerable species. For 103 species we gathered information on biological traits and associated them to three components of vulnerability (sensitivity, adaptive capacity and exposure). For each trait, we assigned high or low scores according to their relationship with climate and land use changes. We considered as exposed, sensitive and with low adaptive capacity those species that reached a high score in any of the traits. Species that reached a high score for all the tree components were classified as highly vulnerable. We found that 67%, 71% and 39% of species were sensitive, had low adaptive capacity or were exposed, respectively; 25% of them were highly vulnerable. Among these species, 10 are currently threatened in Brazil. Overall, the network of protected areas (PAs) harbors a small extent of highly-vulnerable species' range, with 19 species (73%) having <10% of range coverage within PAs. Understanding which species are the most vulnerable and where they are found is crucial to establish conservation priorities aiming to mitigate the negative impacts of environmental changes on species.