School of Integrative Biological & Chemical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations
Dynamic environments generate geographic fluctuations in population structure of an inland shorebird
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-2025
Abstract
Species distributions depend on fine-scale ecological processes and population growth trajectories and are influenced by climate and weather changes. However, the characterization of inter-population dynamics underlying the geographic distributions of migratory organisms remains challenging. We adopted a stable isotope approach to investigate the dynamic population geography of a terrestrial migratory bird across multiple generations. We found that the age-specific geographic source of Mountain Plovers sampled during winter shifted over four years across a latitudinal gradient. Moreover, our results show that differential effects of climate on the probability of occurrence at the wintering ground could be a driver of population turnover in a migratory species adapted to extreme environmental stochasticity (i.e., drought occurrence). We propose a framework for the identification of spatial and temporal climate and weather components and respective effects on population composition and recruitment into migratory wintering populations. Our approach is useful to reveal population compositional shifts through hydrogen stable isotope analysis while accounting for cumulative drought effects.
Recommended Citation
Contina, Andrea, Scott W. Yanco, Allison K. Pierce, Hannah B. Vander Zanden, Craig A. Stricker, Gabriel J. Bowen, and Michael B. Wunder. "Dynamic environments generate geographic fluctuations in population structure of an inland shorebird." Ecosphere 16, no. 6 (2025): e70312. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.70312
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Ecosphere
DOI
10.1002/ecs2.70312
Comments
© 2025 The Author(s). Ecosphere published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Ecological Society of America.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.