Substituting space for time: Bird responses to forest loss in space provide a general picture of responses over time

Abstract

The practice of space-for-time substitution assumes that the responses of species or communities to land-use change over space represents how they will respond to that same change over time. Space-for-time substitution is commonly used in both ecology and conservation, but whether the assumption produces reliable insights remains inconclusive. Here, we tested space-for-time substitution using data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) and Global Forest Change (GFC) to compare the effects of landscape-scale forest cover on bird richness and abundance over time and space, for 25 space–time comparisons. Each comparison consisted of a landscape that experienced at least 20% forest loss over 19 years (temporal site) and a set of 15–19 landscapes (spatial sites) that represented the same forest cover gradient over space in 2019 as experienced over time in their corresponding temporal site. Across the 25 comparisons, the observed responses of forest and open-habitat birds to forest cover over time generally aligned with their responses to forest cover over space, but with comparatively higher variability in the magnitude and direction of effect across the 25 temporal slopes than across the 25 spatial slopes. On average, the mean differences between the spatial and temporal slopes across the 25 space–time comparisons frequently overlapped with zero, suggesting that the spatial slopes are generally informative of the temporal slopes. However, we observed high variability around these mean differences, indicating that a single spatial slope is not strongly predictive of its corresponding temporal slope. We suggest that our results may be explained by annual variability in other relevant environmental factors that combine to produce complex effects on population abundances over time that are not easily captured by snapshots in space. While not being a 1:1 proxy, measuring bird responses to changes in habitat amount in space provides an idea on how birds might be expected to eventually equilibrate to similar changes in habitat amount over time. Further, analyses such as this could be potentially used to screen for cases of regional space–time mismatches where population-limiting factors other than habitat could be playing a more important role in the population trends observed there.