Growing evidence of rapidly changing climate and uncertainty about its biological consequences present pressing scientific challenges. Scientists are confronted with the need to make projections about the biodiversity consequences of future climate change, but often lack data and vetted methods to ensure reliability of such projections. This project will carefully evaluate and then implement different modeling approaches to predict expected changes in species distributions under climate change. North American survey data for birds that have been collected by amateur observers at thousands of locations over the past fifty years offer a unique resource to validate the success of different modeling approaches for use in climate change projections. The research will assess how climatic and other factors control the distribution of species in space and time, how methods to capture such climatic associations of species perform over time, how physiological constraints of species may alter predictions, and whether methods that focus simultaneously on many or just single species give the more reliable projections. Insights from this assessment will be used to select and improve methods to project future distributions of North American birds.
Results from this project will aid conservation biologists around the world. Project deliverables include rigorous, broad-scale projections for species distribution changes for hundreds of bird species and bird communities in the US and Canada, as well as hundreds of nature reserves. Birds are excellent indicators for many other species groups, and the results will have strong implications for the conservation of biodiversity as a whole. The outcomes will be of relevance to land-use and resource managers, conservationist, and the broader public. Results will also contribute to a highly interdisciplinary graduate program that brings together Geology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Anthropology, Social Sciences and the School of Forestry and the Environment at the PI's institution.
