Fig 1.
Overlapped distribution ranges of 17 Emberiza species recorded in Korea and used in this study.
Overlapped distribution ranges are marked in blue contours. The museums and institutions that have preserved Emberiza bunting specimens collected in Korea since 1910 were abbreviated and have been marked on the countries in which they operate. The number of specimens used in this study were noted in parentheses. The base map was made with Natural Earth, and the distribution ranges were from the IUCN Red List for birds prepared by BirdLife International.
Table 1.
The number of collected and banded Emberiza buntings in three different periods in Korea.
There was no bird banding study prior to the 1950s (Period I).
Table 2.
The results of the permutational multivariate analysis of variance using distance matrices of Emberiza bunting communities in Korea.
Fig 2.
Two-dimensional non-metric Multidimensional Scaling (nMDS) ordination of data samples.
Species scores, group scores, and variables (methods and periods) from the nMDS ordination were plotted, and the patterns in bunting community composition were revealed based on the dissimilarities. Each Emberiza species was marked by the first three letters of its epithet in a lower case.
Table 3.
The pairwise comparison of Emberiza bunting communities from the combined museum collection and bird banding data in Korea.
Average abundance (%) in each period, average contribution to overall Bray–Curtis dissimilarity (%) with its standard deviation, and ordered cumulative contributions of six top species were given. The average contribution indicates the species contribution to average between-group dissimilarity. Cumulative contributions are based on the average contributions, but they are standardized to sum up to total 100.
Table 4.
Six main Emberiza species have caused changes in bunting communities and populations in Korea over time.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) status in parentheses indicates the Red List Category and its population trend as of March 2020 (VU: Vulnerable, LC: Least Concern).
Fig 3.
Temporal change in the predicted probability of presence (encounter rate) of Emberiza species in Korea.
The changes between 1997 and 2012 were based on the Korean Nationwide Natural Environment Surveys. The linearly declining trend (P < 0.05) was found in six species: the Yellow-throated (E. elegans), Meadow (E. cioides), Tristram’s (E. tristrami), Pallas’s Reed (E. pallasi), Chestnut-eared (E. fucata), and Yellow-breasted Buntings (E. aureola). Linear regression lines (bold) and their 95% confidence lines (dotted) were given when significant.