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There is an ongoing debate whether local biodiversity is declining and what might drive this change. Changes in land use and land cover (LULC) are suspected to impact local biodiversity. However, there is little evidence for LULC changes beyond the local scale to affect biodiversity across multiple functional groups of species, thus limiting our understanding of the causes of biodiversity change.

Here we investigate whether landscape-wide changes in LULC, defined as either trends in or abrupt changes in magnitude of photosynthetic activity, are driving bird diversity change.

Linking 34 year (1984–2017) time series at 2745 breeding bird survey (BBS) routes across the conterminous United States of America with remotely-sensed Landsat imagery, we assessed for each year what proportion of the landscape surrounding each BBS route changed in photosynthetic activity and tested …