How interacting anthropogenic pressures alter the plasticity of breeding time in two common songbirds

Abstract

Phenological adjustment is the first line of adaptive response of vertebrates when seasonality is disrupted by climate change. The prevailing response is to reproduce earlier in warmer springs, but habitat changes, such as forest degradation, are expected to affect phenological plasticity, for example, due to loss of reliability of environmental cues used by organisms to time reproduction. Relying on a two-decade, country-level capture-based monitoring of common songbirds' reproduction, we investigated how habitat anthropization, here characterized by the rural–urban and forest–farmland gradients, affected the average phenology and plasticity to local temperature in two common species, the great tit Parus major and the blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus. We built a hierarchical model that simultaneously estimated fledging phenology and its response to spring temperatures based on the changes in the proportion of juveniles captured over the breeding season. Both species fledge earlier in warmer sites (blue tit: 2.94 days/°C, great tit: 3.83 days/°C), in warmer springs (blue tit: 2.49 days/°C, great tit: 2.75 days/°C) and in most urbanized habitats (4 days for blue tit and 2 days for great tit). The slope of the reaction norm of fledging phenology to spring temperature varied across sites in both species, but this variation was explained by habitat anthropization only in the deciduous forest specialist, the blue tit. In this species, the responses to spring temperature were shallower in agricultural landscapes and slightly steeper in more urban areas. Habitat anthropization did not explain variation in the slope of the reaction norm in the habitat-generalist species (great tit), for which mean fledgling phenology and plasticity were correlated (i.e., steeper response in later sites). The effects of habitat change on phenological reaction norms provide another way through which combined environmental degradations may threaten populations' persistence, to an extent depending on species and on the changes in their prey phenology and abundance.