DOI: 10.1111/ddi.12694 BIODIVERSITY RESEARCH Higher spring temperatures increase food scarcity and limit the current and future distributions of crossbills Eduardo T. Mezquida1 | Jens-Christian Svenning2 | Ron W. Summers3 | Craig W. Benkman4 1Department of Ecology, Faculty of Sciences, Autonomous University of Madrid, Abstract Madrid, Spain Aim: Understanding how climate affects species distributions remains a major chal- 2 Department of Bioscience, Ecoinformatics lenge, with the relative importance of direct physiological effects versus biotic interac- and Biodiversity Group, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark tions still poorly understood. We focus on three species of resource specialists 3Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (crossbill Loxia finches) to assess the role of climate in determining the seasonal avail- Centre for Conservation Science, North ability of their food, the importance of climate and the occurrence of their food plants Scotland Regional Office, Inverness, UK 4Department of Zoology & Physiology, for explaining their current distributions, and to predict changes in their distributions University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA under future climate change scenarios. Correspondence Location: Europe. Eduardo T. Mezquida, Department of Ecology, Methods: We used datasets on the timing of seed fall in European Scots pine Pinus Faculty of Sciences, Autonomous University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain. sylvestris forests (where different crossbill species occur) to estimate seed fall phenol- Email:
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