Influence of climate and disturbance on the reproductive parameters of Phoenicopterus ruber (Ciconiiformes: Phoenicopteridae), in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

Abstract

The nesting of the Caribbean Flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) has been recorded in nine sites at the Ría Lagartos Biosphere Reserve in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, from 1999 to 2016. This study analyses the influence of climatic variables (precipitation and evaporation) and disturbance, on the selection of the nesting site, colony size, and productivity of the species. Number of reproductive pairs and accumulated productivity were correlated with precipitation and evaporation in three periods: winter, reproductive season, and annually. The predictive capacity of the climatic variables to infer nesting site and population parameters of the species was assessed by univariate and multivariate regressions, and by training a multi-layer perceptron predictive neural network for temporal series. There were not marked differences in the climatic variables of the nesting sites. The correlation between reproductive parameters and climatic variables was statistically significant (Mantel, p < 0.001) when considering the numbers of re productive pairs and the annual and winter accumulated evaporation. We found that disturbance was the main cause that affected the reproductive parameters and may be masking the relationship between the species reproductive parameters and climatic variables.