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Faster fuelling is the key to faster migration

Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 288–289 (2019)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 17 July 2017

arising from: H. Schmaljohann & C. Both Nature Climate Change https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3336 (2017).

When climate change results in the advancement of suitable breeding conditions in spring, migratory birds may face a problem of arriving ‘too late’ to breed under optimal conditions1,2. Schmaljohann and Both3 recently investigated to what degree birds can migrate faster to keep up with the advancing spring, explicitly by reducing the time spent at stopovers (periods of fuelling).

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Fig. 1: Three hypothetical tracks of birds travelling from Africa to northern Europe, ‘recorded’ by, for example, Global Positioning System loggers.

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Acknowledgements

A.H. received support from the Swedish Research Council (2016-03625). The work was carried out within the framework of the Centre for Animal Movement Research (CAnMove) funded by a Linnaeus grant from the Swedish Research Council (349-2007-8690) and Lund University.

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  1. Department of Biology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Åke Lindström, Thomas Alerstam & Anders Hedenström

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  1. Åke Lindström
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  2. Thomas Alerstam
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Contributions

Å.L. initiated the study, wrote the first draft and created Fig. 1. The authors contributed equally to writing subsequent drafts.

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Correspondence to Åke Lindström.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Journal peer review information: Nature Climate Change thanks Jennifer Gill and the other anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Lindström, Å., Alerstam, T. & Hedenström, A. Faster fuelling is the key to faster migration. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 288–289 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0443-7

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