ArticleNature communications2020
Ecological drivers of global gradients in avian dispersal inferred from wing morphology.
Article in Nature communications, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 104 papers.
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104 citing papers in PubMed.
- The link between colorfulness and extinction risk across the world's passerine birds.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Article
- Functional traits explain responses of Appalachian birds to vertical and horizontal forest structure.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Article
- Global relationships between body size and urban affinity across more than 30,000 plant and animal species.eLife · 2026Article
- Contrasting vulnerability profiles for insular assemblages of birds and mammals facing global change.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Article
- Flight style and metabolism shape the tempo of genome evolution in birds.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- High Gene Flow Despite Urbanization: Genetic Diversity and Structure of the Eastern Spotted Dove (Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Carryover effects across juvenile periods vary by species, cause-specific mortality, and stage-specific behavior.Oecologia · 2026Article
- Fit for purpose? Analysis of the relationship between skull, beak shape and feeding ecology in Psittaciformes.Journal of anatomy · 2026Article
- First Record of Dark-sided Flycatcher (Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Functional distinctiveness and rarity highlight climate vulnerability of mountain birds.Ecology · 2026Article
- Body size, wing area, and wing loading follow a pattern of trait conservatism inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Simple mechanistic traits outperform complex syndromes in predicting avian dispersal distances.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Dynamic Morphospaces for Animal Locomotion: A Case Study in Bird Flight.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Review
- Season, Microclimate and Shoreline Disturbance Interactively Shape Bird Functional Diversity.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Article
- Assessing the completeness and consistency of global-scale avian datasets.Scientific reports · 2025Review
- Eavesdropping and contagious alarming in bird communities.Learning & behavior · 2025Article
- Wing morphology of Anchiornis huxleyi and the evolution of molt strategies in paravian dinosaurs.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Scratching beyond the surface: examining macroecological patterns in avian eggshell texture.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
44 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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9 authors.
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Abstract
An organism's ability to disperse influences many fundamental processes, from speciation and geographical range expansion to community assembly. However, the patterns and underlying drivers of variation in dispersal across species remain unclear, partly because standardised estimates of dispersal ability are rarely available. Here we present a global dataset of avian hand-wing index (HWI), an estimate of wing shape widely adopted as a proxy for dispersal ability in birds. We show that HWI is correlated with geography and ecology across 10,338 (>99%) species, increasing at higher latitudes and with migration, and decreasing with territoriality. After controlling for these effects, the strongest predictor of HWI is temperature variability (seasonality), with secondary effects of diet and habitat type. Finally, we also show that HWI is a strong predictor of geographical range size. Our analyses reveal a prominent latitudinal gradient in HWI shaped by a combination of environmental and behavioural factors, and also provide a global index of avian dispersal ability for use in community ecology, macroecology, and macroevolution.
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