The Iberian Peninsula is the closest part of Europe to the African continent and is the location of a series of past and ongoing colonisations, as well as vagrancy events, involving a diversity of African bird species. These are reviewed here. Current climate change scenarios promise to give impetus to distributional changes of flora and fauna worldwide. The high mobility of many bird species makes them particularly capable of making range shifts in the short term and these are becoming increasingly apparent within Iberia. models of climatic conditions in Europe later in the 21st century predict the northward shift of the breeding ranges of many species. They also predict that southern Iberia will become progressively more arid, displacing some of the species that now occur there but perhaps creating niches that North African species especially may be able to occupy. Recent colonists have mainly undergone northward range expansion in the Maghreb previously. Species that are social, associated with restricted-availability habitats such as wetlands and/or are commensal with humans may colonise more readily.
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