The speed of change in climate and land cover is associated with the speed of biodiversity changes in avian assemblages of the United States

PLOS One | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0330153 August 29, 2025 1 / 20 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Acosta Alamo M, Manne LL (2025) The speed of change in climate and land cover is associated with the speed of biodiversity changes in avian assemblages of the United States. PLoS One 20(8): e0330153. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0330153 Editor: Patrick R Stephens, Oklahoma State University, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Received: May 19, 2025 Accepted: July 28, 2025 Published: August 29, 2025 Copyright: © 2025 Acosta Alamo, Manne . This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data availability statement: The data underlying the results presented in the study are openly available from: - North American Breeding Bird Survey [https://www.pwrc. usgs.gov/BBS/RawData/ or https://doi. org/10.5066/P97WAZE5] - PRISM Climate RESEARCH ARTICLE The speed of change in climate and land cover is associated with the speed of biodiversity changes in avian assemblages of the United States Marlen Acosta Alamo 1,2*, Lisa L. Manne1,2 1 Biology Department, College of Staten Island, City University of New York, Staten Island, New York, United States of America, 2 Biology Program, Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, United States of America * macostaalamo@gradcenter.cuny.edu Abstract Changes in climate and land use land cover are a widely recognized threat to the sta-

bility of natural species assemblages’ composition and biodiversity. Species-specific responses to these changes can result in a rearrangement of the species composi- tion of assemblages, altering the stability, resilience, and functioning of the ecosys- tems of which these assemblages are a part. We assessed the relationship between the rate of change in avian species richness and assemblage dissimilarity and the rate of change in climatic and land use land cover variables across 30 years in five ecoregions of the United States. Areas where effects of changing land use land cover and/or climate were most strongly felt were high elevations and latitudes. Rates of species replacement and loss were associated with changing environmental factors in opposite directions. Rates of change in biodiversity were more strongly predicted by rates of change in land use land cover than by rates of change in climate. For the species assemblages studied here, rapidly changing climate and/ or land use land cover was more strongly affecting total assemblage dissimilarity patterns than spe- cies richness even though species richness has received much more research atten- tion. Trends in multiple biodiversity indices capture multiple levels of action (richness vs. assemblage dissimilarity). A study that integrates these allows us to observe the complex and changing interrelationships between biodiversity and the environment (climate and land cover), and thus, plan effectively for preservation of processes that generate patterns of biodiversity. Introduction

Climate change is one of the current drivers of the increasing similarity of species composition among natural species assemblages (i.e., biotic homogenization) [1–5].