Talk:Climate change and birds

Actual topic of article not clearly expressed by title

What about "climate change and birds"?

Is the scope of this article intended to be "The effects of anthropogenic climate change on birds"? or something else? If something else, what? Please ping with reply. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 12:10, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree with your concern, User:Pbsouthwood. We actually have quite a few of the "climate change and XX" articles and I dislike most of them. E.g. we used to have climate change and agriculture until we split it up into two articles: effects of climate change on agriculture and greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

This article on birds should be changed to Effects of climate change on birds (don't think we need to include "anthropogenic" in the title as the common name these days is for climate change is that it equals human-made climate change). Or is its scope wider than the effects of CC on birds? Pinging also the wonderful User:InformationToKnowledge. EMsmile (talk) 14:00, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

P.S. the article might include how birds adapt to climate change but still, this could be part of the article title Effects of climate change on birds. EMsmile (talk) 14:01, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Well, while this article isn't particularly old (a little over three years, apparently, which is downright new when compared with many other climate-change related articles), it had still been around for a while, @Pbsouthwood

I figured that since this article has had the title it does, and the alternative name is a redirect then it must have been for a reason, and so I didn't think about it again as I worked on it recently. I also mentioned this article several times in related discussions with @EMsmile, and she never mentioned renaming this article until now.

I am aware that the other name is more in line with how most of these articles are now named, so I wouldn't oppose swapping the primary name and the redirect. Either way, I am far more interested in feedback on the rest of the article.InformationToKnowledge (talk) 16:20, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Oh, I've proposed renaming that article already a year ago but was overruled at the time, see here: https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Climate_change/Archive_4#Thoughts_on_climate_change_and_ecosystems_-_again_an_overlapping_article . You can see the pros and cons for a name change there. I am still very much in favour of a name change. This is what I wrote there one year ago: "It's not so much the Google searches that I have in mind. It's more to make it clearer to other editors (in particular student editors) what should be the focus of the article. I find that students these days add a lot of stuff to climate change sub-sub-articles but often it doesn't fit all that well. I dread a situation where we get loads and loads of small sub-articles which are all called "climate change and..." (could be "climate change and pets", "climate change and wildfires", "climate change and flowers") which the experienced Wikipedians later have to mop up, merge, update. If we call these articles rather "effects of climate change on..." it's much clearer what they are for. I noticed that also for the article that used to be called "climate change and agriculture". It was quite a mess until we split it into greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and effects of climate change on agriculture. If the article is just "CC and XX " it is not always clear if we are talking about effects of CC on XX or if we're talking about the impacts of XX on climate change (like you can see from the agriculture example)." EMsmile (talk) 20:54, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Note the pageviews for this article are still extremely low (about 20 per day) which makes me less motivated to work on this article than on other articles. But happy to see other people feeling motivated to improve this article or even this suite of articles. It's important work. EMsmile (talk) 20:54, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Summoned by Yapperbot. Made a few minor changes. I agree with the name change and swap with the redirect, for the reasons stated above by EMsmile. STEMinfo (talk) 00:36, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

The article title and scope declaration must agree, and inform the reader and potential editor what is to be expected in the article. One cannot comment on the completeness of coverage when the scope is uncertain. This is important for GA review, and for that matter, for B-class review. as a criterion for both is how complete the coverage is (broad coverage, and on topic), and to assess that, the scope must be sufficiently defined. Consider also that birds have been around through previous climate changes, some far more severe than we are seeing at present, and a few mass extinctions, so not limiting scope to anthropogenic change opens the article wide to a lot of paleontological content that is currently entirely absent, and would have to be acknowledged and summarised at the very least to meet completeness criteria. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 08:07, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

As far as I understood the scope of this article, it's only about the human-induced climate change. And that's big enough. The content for other geologic timeframes can be covered elsewhere (and we can link across in the See also section for example). So I think there are no objects to the name change and we can go ahead? Or are there still objections? Maybe I should ping User:sadads as he might like to weigh in. EMsmile (talk) 11:01, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

If we want to be strict about it, nearly all of the known mass extinction events occurred long before the birds have evolved. The only exceptions are the K-Pg extinction (aka The Asteroid) and Eocene–Oligocene extinction event, which is considered a minor mass extinction next to the Big Ones, but is still far larger than what has happened in the Holocene extinction to date. (Unfortunately, we are almost certainly on track to match at least that one event in the foreseeable future, and it will take efforts we are not currently seeing to fall short of it.)

A section describing what is known about the fate of contemporary avian species during those two extinction events may actually be quite reasonable for this article. I think it would serve as a much better transition between the lead and the body than the current thin "causes" paragraph (and which may be difficult to expand without talking too much about the generalities of climate change.)

It also doesn't seem like this prehistoric section would take much space: E-O event page does not mention birds at all, and only one paper from 2011 is cited to discuss birds during the K-Pg event. Granted, this may reflect the (lack of) attention from editors about this subject far more than the actual state of research, but even then, it should be a lot less time-consuming then many of the paragraphs I already added here.

Are there any other suggestions? I already intend to rewrite the lead (largely unchanged from where it was before I started to work on the article) to reflect the expanded article better and to preferably follow the four-paragraph rule - once we have a solid consensus on the sections necessary for this article, that is. I am curious if you have any image suggestions you would like to see. I would like something for the (currently) final mitigation section, but I would rather not do the easy thing and just stick a random wind turbine on it unless there are literally no better options. And I think that a photo of the smoke-caused North American migratory bird die-off would help a lot with underlining the grim point for the "Extreme events" section, but I'm unsure if there are any such photos with appropriate licenses. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:22, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

P.S. I see the point EMSmile makes about this article being rather obscure and so not of high priority for improvement. The main reason I went about improving this particular article was after discovering some related material in the soon-to-be-gone terrestrial animals page. I still think its status is likely to change for better with our recent expansion and as it gets linked across more pages for individual bird species. Additionally, it's linked on Extinction risk from climate change, which I'll certainly be nominating for GA after a few final touches.

As for the title, EMSmile's recent edit (see summaries) makes me contemplate calling the article "Bird adaptation to climate change" and listing the first two sections (physical changes and phenology) under "Examples" heading, while the next two ("Extreme events" + "Extinction") would go as "Failures of adaptation". I think there's a chance it might become a lot more visible that way. Unfortunately, it would also make the sub-article standardization issue worse.

So far, we have "decline" articles for animal classes not primarily affected by climate change (amphibians, insects and likely wild mammals once my draft is reviewed), two "climate change and" articles (this one and fisheries) and two "effects of climate change" articles (plant diversity and oceans). In the future, we'll likely have to have either a "decline" or "effects of" article on reptiles, depending on what the literature supports.

When all the sub-articles are listed together (the way they are on extinction risk article) the discrepancy becomes rather apparent and a unique title here would clearly make it worse. Reworking this article into a "decline" one doesn't seem feasible (seemingly not enough RS describing a generalized decline in bird populations unrelated to climate to avoid climate change dominating such article), so changing this to "effects of" might be the least worst option. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:27, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for these additional explanations. Just a brief response, I think the title "effects of climate change on birds" is probably better than a more narrow title of "Bird adaptation to climate change" because e.g. the issue of bird loss from wind turbines would no longer fit there, right? I think adaptation could be subsumed under "effects of" (perhaps we need suitable sub-headings though to highlight this adaptation issue). But I am not even sure if "climate change adaptation" is the suitable term here of it's reserved for the conscious decisions that humans are making to adapt to the effects of climate change? Wouldn't it be more about "changes of bird activities resulting from effects of climate change"?. Either way, I would still be quite happy with an article title "effects of climate change on birds". EMsmile (talk) 17:59, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

After taking a break from this article and looking at it with fresh eyes, I think would be opposed to a rename, because I would rather rework this page into a "decline of" article instead.

One reason is that I looked further into reptiles and while a "decline" article for them would be more difficult than for the other taxa due to limited observational records, it would still be easier, and more reasonable (not to mention notable) than an "effects of" article. Moreover, Effects of climate change on plant biodiversity article only looks acceptable on its surface because it has a lot of good images, but now that I looked at it more carefully, I see it's little better than the terrestrial animals article, with many references being barely verifiable and/or 15-20 years old and so many sections vague or barely relevant to the subject. Considering that other drivers like agriculture are considered far more important than climate change by the foremost experts on the subject (see the plant section of extinction risk article), "Decline of plant biodiversity" would almost certainly make for a superior article as well. In that case, there would finally be consistency, with every class of wildlife getting the same kind of article documenting (sadly) more-or-less the same trends, which can then all be linked on both extinction risk and biodiversity loss articles. It'll take time, but it will make us much stronger as an encyclopedia.

The other reason is because I think I figured out how to prevent a "decline" version of this article from being dominated by climate change. One is extensive sections on the more "traditional" drivers of bird declines like habitat loss and pesticides (the whole reason behind Silent Spring, after all). With the current article becoming "Climate change" subheading, I would reorder it so that "Range" goes first, then "Extreme disturbance events" (possibly with subheading for each event type like "Wildfires" now) and then "Extinction". "Physical changes" would be reworked into "Adaptation" and become the last subheading. Some of "Phenology" would go there too, but only a little bit. Most of it should probably be offloaded to Phenological mismatch - technically an important article for our readers, yet one which is really, really bad right now.

If no-one objects to this idea, I would probably have to withdraw GA nomination until I get this article reorganization done. My main goal was to get feedback and ideas for improving the article, and now I have them, even if not in its current form. Renominating the new article once it's brought up to speed shouldn't be an issue. For now, I have started another nomination for Thwaites Glacier. (Ideally, we should want all of the non-list articles within the project's remit to be at GA+ level, and unlike this article, TG has a nicely constrained scope, so why wait?) InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:30, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

OK, that's fine by me if you want to rework it in that way. (we don't have an article yet on decline of bird population, perhaps under a different title?). Regarding "Decline of plant biodiversity", I am wondering if that couldn't be covered in the biodiversity loss article. It's just one more example of biodiversity loss. Or, I guess "Decline of plant biodiversity" could be seen as a sub-article to biodiversity loss. however, the more "sub" an article gets, the lower its pageviews get. The main article is biodiversity, then the sub-article of that is biodiversity loss, and the sub-sub-article would be plant biodiversity loss...

Regarding getting all projects that are tagged with WikiProject Climate Change to GA level, this is in theory nice but in practice too ambitious in my opinion. As you can see here, that's about 4000 articles! Even if you took only those that are currently rated as B class, it would still be 261 articles. Also remember if you are nominating articles for GA review then in Wikipedia etiquette you are also expected to review other people's GA nominations. Would you have time and energy to review about 260 articles (on all sorts of topics) for GA review? EMsmile (talk) 07:34, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Well, you could make the same argument about the current, climate-change oriented version of that article: The main article is climate change, then the sub-article of that is effects of climate change, and then every single "effects of climate change on X" becomes a sub-sub-article by that logic.

In both instances, the main issue is page size. According to the numerous discussions on sea level rise talk page, article size ideally shouldn't exceed 8000 words. Biodiversity loss article is currently at 6946 words - and that is with "Observations by type of life" still missing mention of mammalian life or reptile life, and perhaps other issues (i.e. I see that it still uncritically cites that 68% figure from the Living Planet Index - even the Holocene extinction article now mentions this Nature study which makes the whole estimate look very different). The only time biodiversity loss article specifically mentions plants is in a 178-word section on Trees. The idea that the few hundred words left in the article before it exceeds ideal size limit (and after the other issues are fixed) are going to be enough to describe biodiversity trends for the rest of the most ancient kingdom of multicellular life is, to be frank, implausible.

Yes, I am aware that GA nominations involve reviews of other articles as part of the process, and I do intend to start on that once the most glaring deficiences (in my view, at least) in our project's articles are addressed. It is indeed an ambitious goal and I don't even want to think how long it'll take. Nevertheless, shoot for the moon and you will land among the stars and all that. Even if it's ultimately purely aspirational, it'll still leave the encyclopedia in a much better state. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 09:52, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

OK, yes, I agree with your assessment. I just mentioned the sub-sub-article problem for two reasons: sub-sub articles get lower pageviews, so they are not a "low hanging fruit" (with regards to impact of our work) and I personally prefer to focus on the higher pageview articles (but that's just personal preference). Secondly, it's good if the article tree structure is clear from the start in order to avoid duplication. E.g. the article biodiversity loss should have some/enough content about plant biodiversity loss in order to paint the full picture but then send people to the sub-article for more details. Many times, I've seen too much overlap between parent and sub-article (this is where excerpts can sometimes be great; although too many excerpts or too long excerpts hinder the logical flow and reading ease, in my opinion). EMsmile (talk) 10:47, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes, this makes sense. I suppose this and related articles hold higher importance to me because I consider it all to be integral to the project of reorganizing the extinction risk article (and potentially the ecosystems article in the future), because these articles are its immediate "vicinity", and seeing them all form a strong "constellation" just appears to be something which will pay off in the longer run, even if it won't be immediately reflected in pageviews.

Either way, I withdrew the nomination of this article for now, as I'm quite certain of my plan to rename and rework it now. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:26, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

So what is the proposed rename? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 15:18, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Decline in bird populations. With that title, it would cover both the impacts of climate change and the other factors which have been causing bird abundance/biodiversity/etc. to decline. (A decline which is unfortunately indisputable: see this recent RS, which will be used in the upcoming article once I get to it.) It will also match the other articles about the declining kingdoms of life: i.e. Decline in amphibian populations and Decline in insect populations right now, but it seems like there's enough data to justify creating such articles for the rest of the kingdoms as well (so, birds here, but also wild mammals, reptiles and plants.) InformationToKnowledge (talk) 12:31, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Please also see a related discussion here: https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Talk:Effects_of_climate_change_on_ecosystems#Earlier_discussion_about_merging_to_biodiversity_loss where we are talking about decline in plant biodiversity. I mentioned there that it should perhaps be clear already in the title which timeframe we are talking about, i.e. not the pre-historic times. Therefore perhaps Decline in bird populations since 1850, like we have retreat of glaciers since 1850, or Decline in bird populations from human activities or something like that? EMsmile (talk) 13:21, 9 October 2023 (UTC)