This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY 2010. The fellowship supports a research and training plan entitled "Population re-distribution and its role in fluctuating local bird abundances" for Charles Yackulic. The host institutions for this research are Princeton University and the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, with sponsoring scientists Simon Levin and James Nichols, respectively.
According to source-sink theory, populations that consistently have more deaths than births ("sinks") can persist over long periods of time so long as there is dispersal from populations where births outnumber deaths ("sources"). Despite widespread agreement about the importance of source-sink dynamics in explaining population trends of many Northern American bird species, there are still large holes in our understanding of source-sink dynamics across the geographic ranges of individual species. The main objective of this project is to apply informatics tools for analysis of existing long term datasets in the Breeding Bird Survey and identify sources and sinks of North American bird species. Time series of relative abundances are being analyzed through the use of hierarchical Bayesian diffusion models.
Training goals include gaining expertise in both spatiotemporal statistical modeling and diffusion models. Professional development goals include co-teaching statistical workshops at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. This project promises to inform management practices for avian species of conservation concern in North America.
