Asian Birds May Need Help to Adapt to Climate Change: Study

Many bird species will likely suffer under future climate change, according to a new study.

Researchers from Durham University in the U.K. and BirdLife International have revealed that climate change could affect bird population, leading to changing species composition at individual sites.

For their study, the research team studied 370 Asian bird species of conservation concern across the Eastern Himalaya and Lower Mekong regions, including countries of Bhutan, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as parts of Nepal and India.

They examined the potential future distributions of suitable climate within conservation sites (Important Bird Areas). Their projections showed that up to 88 percent of the 370 species will likely experience declines in suitable climate. The research team considered almost 500 scenarios of each bird species' response to future climate change. Despite uncertainty in future climate projections, the researchers believe that changes in bird communities will likely occur.

"It is striking that despite big differences among these scenarios, they agree on the final outcome. Even under the least extreme scenarios of climate change, most species we examined will have to shift their ranges in order to find suitable areas in the future," co-lead author Robert Bagchi, a Research Fellow at the ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), said in a statement.

Bagchi and his colleagues insist that Asian birds need assistance to adapt to more suitable locations for their survival.

Although the birds will manage their distributions and find new habitats with a suitable climate, there is a need for better management of countryside bird areas to help them disperse or even relocate in most extreme cases, said co-lead author Stephen Willis from Durham University.

"We expect there to be 24 times as many 'losers' as 'winners' in terms of bird species losing or gaining habitat in the future," he said.

The findings of the study are published in the journal Global Change Biology.