BIRDCHANGE

Exploring bird distribution drivers across differentspatial scales and time to predict the potential impact of global change on bird distributions and diversity

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'Global change impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem processes and human well-being are a pressing scientific and political concern. One of the major goals of global change research is to reliably predict the future distributions of species and to assess potential resulting consequences for the adaptive management of ecosystems and their services and for conservation strategies. Dramatically increased availability of biodiversity data at broad scales, recent advances in statistical approaches such as ‘species niche modelling’ and progress in high-performance computing now allow data handling and the simulation of future climatic and biodiversity scenarios. Despite the popularity of niche modelling for predicting the potential impacts of global change on species distributions, to date a validation of this approach at biogeographically relevant scales is lacking. Through the use of very extensive datasets of North American birds (starting in 1966), this project will assess the reliability of niche modelling predictions through cross-temporal validations. Such independent validation will also enable us to assess which predictors and what spatial scale provide most accurate predictions. Using this knowledge, I will then predict the potential impact of global change on North American bird distributions. Going beyond just species richness, I will also evaluate and predict changes to the functional and phylogenetic make-up of bird communities. Finally, where possible I will carefully extend several of these predictions of global change impacts to breeding and wintering communities of birds worldwide. This first global assessment will e.g. help identify, at biogeographic scales, migratory birds species potentially most affected by impending climatic changes or pinpoint areas where the bird diversity may be particularly exposed to future change. I expect the resulting findings to significantly advance broad-scale global change ecology and help inform conservation and policy.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

Researchers are using data on North American birds to improve species distribution models (SDMs), which can predict how species will be affected by climate change.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Global climate change is expected to have a massive impact on where plants and animals are found. Scientists have developed countless SDMs to predict these changes, but these have not been validated on a large scale.

The EU-funded BIRDCHANGE project is using decades of data on the distribution of bird species in North America to validate such models. Researchers aim to confirm the best climate predictors for SDMs, and will try to apply these findings to global distribution modelling.

They have used data for 243 species since 1971 to test how useful various climate predictors are for producing accurate SDMs. They found that three temperature-related predictors and one rainfall-linked predictor provided the most accurate models.

Using these more accurate SDMs, BIRDCHANGE has attempted to predict changes in worldwide bird distribution for the first time. Researchers have made predictions of species richness and functional diversity, which suggest that distribution will change dramatically in response to climate change.

BIRDCHANGE has improved the methodology of SDMs, and used these improved models to predict global changes to bird populations. The project's findings have far-reaching implications for conservation and biodiversity management.