Validating and Advancing Continent-Wide Projections of Species' Geographic Distributions in the Face of Global Change

越来越多的证据表明气候迅速变化及其生物学后果的不确定性构成了紧迫的科学挑战。科学家们面临着预测未来气候变化对生物多样性的影响的需要，但往往缺乏数据和经过审查的方法来确保这种预测的可靠性。该项目将仔细评估并实施不同的建模方法，以预测气候变化下物种分布的预期变化。在过去的50年里，业余观测者在数千个地点收集了北美鸟类的调查数据，为验证用于气候变化预测的不同建模方法的成功提供了独特的资源。这项研究将评估气候和其他因素如何控制物种在空间和时间上的分布，捕捉物种的这种气候关联的方法如何随着时间的推移而表现，物种的生理约束如何改变预测，以及同时关注许多物种还是仅仅关注单个物种的方法是否能给出更可靠的预测。从这次评估中获得的见解将用于选择和改进预测北美鸟类未来分布的方法。这个项目的结果将帮助世界各地的保护生物学家。项目成果包括对美国和加拿大数百种鸟类和鸟类群落的物种分布变化进行严格、大规模的预测，以及数百个自然保护区。鸟类是许多其他物种群的优秀指标，其结果将对整个生物多样性的保护具有重要意义。研究结果将与土地使用和资源管理者、自然资源保护主义者和广大公众息息相关。研究结果还将用于一个高度跨学科的研究生项目，该项目将地质学、生态学和进化生物学、人类学、社会科学以及PI所在机构的林业与环境学院结合在一起。

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.