The impact of land use change on migrant birds in the Sahel

In this paper, published in Biodiversity, a systematic review of published scientific literature is used to assess the evidence base for the links between dryland environmental change in the Sahel and numbers of migrant birds that winter in this region. It analyses the extent to which understanding is based on fieldwork in the Sahel itself and concludes that, despite the scientific consensus about the significance of human land use change on bird numbers, field evidence is greatly lacking. The two land use changes for which most evidence exist are loss of wetland and woodland habitats for which impacts on migrant bird species are largely, but not uniformly, negative. More direct research on the links between bird populations and dryland land use change in the Sahel is urgently needed.

Adams, W. M., Small, R. D. S., & Vickery, J. A. (2014). The impact of land use change on migrant birds in the Sahel. Biodiversity, 15(2-3), 101–108. doi:10.1080/14888386.2014.931822 

This paper is an output of the CCI Collaborative Fund project Reversing the declines of African‐Palaearctic migrants