Evaluacion del impacto del cambio climatico sobre la composicion de especies y estructura de grupos funcionales de las comunidades de aves en laderas andinas.

Climate change is one of the main threats to biodiversity worldwide. Climate change can affect organisms directly through changes in abiotic variables, or indirectly through alterations in interspecific interactions. Organisms may respond to climate change in four ways: extinction (local or global), acclimation through phenotypic plasticity, genetic adaptation, or shifts in geographic distribution that track the spatial shift in climatic conditions. The impacts of climate change on biodiversity have been studied in two ways: using simulation models or empirically documenting changes in populations or geographic distributions that correlate with climate change. The study of abiotic variables has mostly focused on temperature, because this variable is clearly associated with physiological performance. Mountain systems are favorable for studying the effects of climate change on organisms, because there is a negative correlation between temperature and elevation. Therefore, unidimensional upslope elevational shifts of species’ ranges are expected in proportion to the magnitude of increases in local temperature. although models highlight the vulnerability of montane biotas to climate change, particularly in the tropics, there is little empirical documentation of actual responses due to the lack of historical data that can be used as a baseline for documenting changes in biotic communities and correlating them with trends in climatic data. In this project I propose using historical inventories of the bird community at a site on the western range of the Colombian andes that go back 100 years, as a baseline to determine if any changes have occurred in the species composition and structure of functional groups, and correlate them with possible climatic changes as documented by meteorological stations in the region.