Avifauna Persistence and Vulnerabilities: Island Biogeography Across Long Time Scales

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Changes in climate and in other natural environmental factors as well as human-related land-use changes have had some of the greatest impacts on biodiversity. With the goal of enhancing understanding of historic biogeography, this research project will investigate questions about the persistence versus loss of species under a variety of climate-induced conditions and human-caused environmental change. The project will develop new insights regarding how species and ecosystems respond to the direct and indirect effects of changes in climate, including warmer temperatures and rising sea levels. A deeper understanding of species responses to the past effects of climate and other global changes will improve capabilities to forecast the impacts of future changes. Project results will contribute to scientific understanding of how global changes affect ecosystems and the services they provide to humans. The findings will help inform policy makers, governmental agencies, and resource administrators as they assess appropriate courses of action to mitigate effects of future climate change. This project also will strengthen international research collaborations among U.S. and Caribbean scientists and institutions.Using islands as microcosms for understanding human interactions with the environment, this project will analyze species traits of land-bird communities in terms of their resilience versus vulnerability from multiple contexts. It will combine data about paleontology, radiocarbon chronology, paleoclimate, and modern plant and animal communities to develop a rigorous model of long-term biotic change. Species-level identifications of fossils will portray changes in species communities, which will be evaluated in light of their specific life-history traits, such as climatic niche, habitat preference, feeding guild, and range attributes (widespread vs. endemic). An innovative form of species distribution modeling will be used to characterize the climatically suitable habitat or "climate envelope" for each species and develop quantitative, empirical, predictive models of species-environment relationships. Project findings will provide new perspectives about the relationships among contemporary species distributions and climate (and other environmental predictors). They also will permit the investigators to "hindcast" species distributions in previous time periods. Given wide-spread concerns about ongoing and future impacts of natural environmental and human-related changes on biogeography and biodiversity, this project will provide data-rich context and validation for research investigations that previously have tended to rely on modeling and projections.