INTRO: The authors are studying distribution changes and species richness of waterbirds in Europe and in Northern Africa and the role of the current network of protected areas in adaptation to such changes.
MERITS: I think the dataset in this manuscript is very impressive and the goals of the study are well set to disentangle the role of protected areas in conservation of waterbirds at large scale in a changing world.
CRITIQUE: I do not see any major weaknesses or problems in this manuscript.
DISCUSSION: I think that the results of this study are important in revealing the change in waterbird abundances and species richness through time and across the most important flyways. Furthermore, the results could be applied in decision making in habitat protection and in general, in the conservation of waterbirds. This piece of work fits well in the ECCB conference.
- - -
INTRO: This study examines the changes in winter waterbird distribution in two European-African flyways. The authors make use of an extensive dataset, including 166 species across 44 countries, for 26 years. They investigate if changes in the waterbird occurrence patterns differ between protected and non-protected areas, combining different international protected area systems (SPAs, Ramsar). Changes in species richness are compared to the amount of protected areas in different sections of the flyways. Results of four distinct analyses will be discussed.
MERITS: Analyses at this scale (amount of species considered and spatial and temporal dimension), and for this combination of protected area networks are useful to estimate the capacity of protected area systems to account for changes in waterbird distribution patterns in a changing climate.
CRITIQUE: It is not entirely clear which spatial extent is considered, or which flyways exactly (and why: most important because used by most species? highest number of individuals?), and whether climatic indicators are taken into account for the analyses as well. The latter would be necessary to link the abundance patterns with climatic changes and disentangle effects related to other human impacts (land-use change etc.). To assess the effectiveness of protected area networks, some caution is in order when only nonbreeding distributions are taken into account, especially since many waterbirds are migratory (but this is the 'nature' of the data, or do the authors correct for this aspect?). For goals (3) and (4), additional indices (compared to species richness) might be interesting to look at.
DISCUSSION: It will be very interesting and relevant to see how waterbird distribution is accounted for by different protected area systems, that deal with different criteria and have different levels of protection (hard legislation N2000 versus e.g. Ramsar).
- - -
INTRO: | The authors have analysed 26 years of data on wintering waterbirds across 44 countries in Europe and Africa. The goals were to test if the winter abundances of 166 species have changed during the past three decades across the two most important flyways in Europe and northern Africa, to study whether such long-term trends in wintering numbers differed between protected and unprotected areas, to assess potential changes in species richness over the study period in the northeastern, central and southwestern part of the flyways, and to compare whether changes in richness is linked to the amount of protected land in each region. The results of the analyses will be discussed. |
|
MERITS: Highly relevant topic for conservation. Impressive data set temporally and spatially.
CRITIQUE: No results at the moment.
DISCUSSION: NA
