Effects of Climate-Changes on Patterns of Seasonal Changes in Bird Population in Rice Fields using a Prey-Predator Model

Abstract BACKGROUND: It is well known that rice-fields can provide excellent foraging places for birds including seasonal migrants, wintering, and breeding and hence the high biodiversity of rice-fields may be expected. However, how environmental change including climate-changes on life-history and population dynamics in birds on rice-fields has not been fully understood. In order to investigate how climate-change affects population migratory patterns and migration timing, I modeled a population dynamics of birds in rice-fields over a whole year. METHODS AND RESULTS: I applied the Lotka-Volterra equation to model the population dynamics of birds that have been foraging/visiting rice-fields in Korea. The simple model involves the number of interspecific individuals and temperature, and the model parameters are periodic in time as the biological activities related to the migration, wintering and reproduction are seasonal. As results, firstly there was a positive relationship between the variation of seasonal population sizes and temperature change. Secondly, the reduced lengths of season were negatively related to the population size. Overall, the effects of the difference of lengths of season on seasonal population dynamics were higher than the effects of seasonal temperature change.