Research reveals the vertical gradient pattern of birds in the Central Himalayas

Funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Special Science and Technology Development Project of the Guangdong Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Zoology, Guangdong Academy of Sciences, together with East China Normal University and the University of Toronto in Canada, revealed the vertical gradient pattern of the function and pedigree structure of breeding birds in the Jilong Valley of the Central Himalayas.
It provides a new perspective for the construction mechanism of bird communities in this area
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Related research was published in Ecography on July 12

How to construct a community is the core and fundamental issue of ecological research.
In recent years, research on integrating functional traits and pedigree information has provided new ideas for the ecological process of community construction
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Mount Everest is the top of the world, with a unique ecosystem of extremely high mountains in the world, and is listed as one of the 34 biodiversity hotspots in the world

The study analyzed the species, function, and pedigree diversity of 151 breeding birds surveyed four times between 2012 and 2013
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The results showed that the diversity indexes of the three dimensions all showed similar unimodal patterns; but after controlling for the influence of species richness, functional diversity showed a pattern of decreasing with altitude, and pedigree diversity showed a low altitude pattern.

In general, the bird community exhibits functional aggregation, which may indicate the important role of habitat filtration in community construction; the difference is that the pedigree structure diverges at low and high altitudes, and clusters appear at mid-altitudes
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These findings indicate that the function and pedigree indexes are quite different in the vertical gradient pattern; by comparing and analyzing the differences between the two, it is possible to better understand the community structure and predict the community construction mechanism behind it

In addition, mid-elevation areas are worthy of attention due to their high species diversity.

Related paper information: https://doi.