Functional biogeography of dietary strategies in birds

Aim Diet is key to understanding resource use by species, their relationships with their environment and biotic interactions. We aimed to identify the major strategies that shape the diet space of birds and to investigate their spatial distributions in association with biogeographical, bioclimatic and anthropogenic drivers. Location Global. Time period Current. Major taxa studied Birds. Methods We analysed score-based assessments of eight diet categories for 8,937 out of 10,964 extant bird species. We constructed a multivariate diet space by ordinating these data in a principal coordinates analysis and assessed its dimensionality as a balance between the representation of original diet scores and parsimony. We averaged the positions of species along each dimension for 12,705 species assemblages and used quantile regressions to infer the relative contributions of species richness, climate, primary productivity, topography and human footprint to the spatial distribution of the diet space at a global scale. Results The diet space of birds was structured by four dimensions ordinating species along continua ranging from insectivory to plant-based strategies, granivory to frugivory, common to rare diets, and nectarivory to carnivory and piscivory. Although orthogonal at the species level, these dimensions were correlated among species assemblages, with regional variation consistent with past climatic and tectonic events. Human footprint packed bird assemblages in the diet space, whereas warm climate, high productivity and high topographic variability were associated with high variability in the prevalence of dietary strategies among assemblages. Main conclusions The tremendous variability in bird diets can be explained by a few basic ecological continua sustained by morphological and ecophysiological differences among species. Strong biogeographical legacies on top of bioclimatic drivers distribute this diet space in species assemblages through environmental filtering and niche packing. However, these patterns are altered at macroecological scales by human-mediated functional homogenization, which might, in turn, affect the global distribution of bird functions and services.