ORIGINAL ARTICLE Linking the diversity and structure of French avian communities with landscape parameters, climate and NPP flows Claire Lorel 1 & Isabelle Le Viol 2 & Christoph Plutzar 3,4 & Frédéric Jiguet 1 & Maud Mouchet 1 Received: 27 February 2020 /Accepted: 30 April 2021 # The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2021 Abstract Increasing land use intensification (“LUI”) threatens ecosystem functioning by altering the flows of net primary production (“NPP”) and interacts with other drivers of change (landscape use, climate). According to the “species-energy” hypothesis, such alteration of NPP flows should affect biodiversity patterns. However, the capability of the human appropriation of NPP (“HANPP”) to drive species community patterns has received little evaluation so far. Using linear mixed-effects models, we assessed the efficiency of indicators related to HANPP, landscape and climate to explain the variability of seven biodiversity facets (i.e. species richness, mean trophic level, habitat specialization, functional richness, evenness, divergence and dispersion) calculated from 2286 avian communities from the French national monitoring survey of breeding birds. Whether indicators related to HANPP or landscape best explain biodiversity facets greatly vary from one biodiversity index to another, but the landscape characteristics were almost always the best predictors of avian communities over NPP flows or climate. Only func- tional evenness and mean trophic level were consistently explained by NPP flows and almost not by landscape parameters. Overall, climate (i.e. temperature and precipitation) was a weak predictor of biodiversity at this spatial scale. Most biodiversity facets exhibited a hump-shaped relationship with NPP flows, except for habitat specialization and functional divergence (U- shaped relationship). These findings imply that (i) the response of one facet cannot be a surrogate for the overall response of biodiversity, (ii) the choice of one indicator should be hypothesis-driven and (iii) account for its ability to detect the phenomenon at stake. Keywords Biodiversity . Human appropriation of net primary productivity . Landscape structure and composition . Species-energy relationship Introduction Though geoclimatic factors and evolutionary history have shaped biodiversity patterns at large spatial and temporal scales (Bellard et al. 2012; Thuiller 2007), anthropogenic changes, especially land use changes, are widely acknowl- edged as the major drivers of the ongoing biodiversity loss (IPBES 2019). Land use intensity (hereafter “LUI”) has been seen as a solution to ensure societal issues like housing and food provisioning, by increasing the outputs per land unit Communicated by Wolfgang Cramer * Maud Mouchet maud.mouchet@mnhn.fr Claire Lorel claire.lorel@edu.mnhn.fr Isabelle Le Viol isabelle.leviol@mnhn.fr Christoph Plutzar christoph.plutzar@boku.ac.at Frédéric Jiguet frederic.jiguet@mnhn.fr 1 CESCO, UMR7204 MNHN-CNRS-SU, CP135, 57 rue Cuvier, 75005 Paris, France 2 CESCO, UMR7204 MNHN-CNRS-SU, Station marine, 1 quai de la Croix, 29900 Concarneau, France 3 Institute of Social Ecology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Schottenfeldgasse 29, A-1070 Vienna, Austria 4 Division of Conservation Biology, Vegetation Ecology and Landscape Ecology, University of Vienna, Rennweg 14, A-1030 Vienna, Austria https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-021-01786-y / Published online: 2 June 2021 Regional Environmental Change (2021) 21: 61