Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Conservation policy in a changing world: integrating citizen science data from national monitoring schemes to model impacts of global change s

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Innovative research on the complex interaction of socio-economic and global environmental trends on biodiversity and ecosystem services is needed to help develop more informative scenarios for addressing environmental and human development challenges. To overcome these challenges coupled natural-human systems approaches and analyses are needed. These provide improved scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services that couple the outputs of direct and indirect drivers such as land use, invasive species, overexploitation, biodiversity, environmental change, and pollution. The resulting models provide a methodological state-of-the art that results in more accurate quantitative assessments, better land use, and more effective ecosystem services. Employing this methodology, this research project, which is an international coalition between US scientists and those from Fennoscandinavian nations, seeks to use birds as bioindicators of environmental health on large scales such as changes to farming or forestry practices and on smaller scales such as environmental recovery from localized severe weather or pollution events. This choice of indicator is because birds are valuable indicators of environmental conditions because they are ubiquitous in most environments, with different species having different food and habitat requirements. Thus, birds, as a group, sample environments in different ways during the process of acquiring food which can range from small organisms, such as plankton, to animals larger than rabbits, depending on the species of bird and its evolved food requirements. Additionally, when environmental conditions make food scarce, most species of birds simply fly away and seek more conducive environs. As a result, the response of birds to changing conditions can be far more rapid than the responses of less mobile organisms. Birds are also typically visually and vocally obvious and there are bird-watching hobbyists (i.e. citizen scientists) across the globe who observe and record the birds they see throughout the year and what those birds are doing. Thus, large amounts of data exist from which we can learn about the environmental conditions preferred by a large number of species of birds. Project goals are to: (1) create methods for identifying a set of bird species that are good indicators of environmental conditions in habitats such as alpine/arctic tundra, highly managed and natural forests, and farmland and (2) use this information to anticipate changes in physical conditions (e.g., weather) and those caused by people (e.g., land use and farming practices). Broader impacts of this research include international collaboration scientists in Norway, Sweden, and Finland and the use of citizen science and the collection of data by the birdwatching public. Impacts also include those that are societal and economic in terms of the relation of study results to achieving sustainable harvests and fisheries. Other impacts include development of a planning tool for minimizing losses of key ecosystem services from birds in forest regeneration, pest management, and sustainable harvests that can be used by resource managers. Results of the study will be valuable for the development of science-based policies where avian species play a role.This award supports US researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a coalition of 26 funding agencies from 23 countries through the Belmont Forum call for proposals on "Scenarios of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services". The call was a multilateral initiative designed to support research projects that contribute to the development of scenarios, models, and decision-support tools for understanding and solving critical issues facing our planet. The goal of the competition was to improve and apply participatory scenario methods to enhance research relevance and its acceptance and to address gaps in methods for modelling impact drivers and policy interventions. It was also to develop and communicate levels of uncertainty associated with the models, to improve data accessibility and fill gaps in knowledge. Using this methodology, the funded project will address knowledge gaps on the links between biodiversity and habitat alteration using birds as indicator species. Project objectives are to improve methods for predicting the responses of birds to changes in their environments. Instead of merely looking at correlations between where species live and features of the environments they inhabit or travel though, this work examine the causal associations between birds and their environments by looking at functional traits (i.e., those that lead birds to respond to changes in their environment). To accomplish this, the project makes use of year-round data from a large geographic area, i.e., Europe, to track migratory bird species and their habitat associations in their summer and winter ranges and along their migratory routes to determine when and where responses to environmental change are strongest, thus improving our ability to accurately forecast responses to environmental changes. This is a "whole-life-cycle" approach to assessing population health and is only now being explored by ecological researchers. The US component of the project focuses on developing computationally intensive machine-learning methods by investigators who have extensive expertise in working with very large citizen science data sets. The parts of the project carried out by scientists from other countries will be funded by those countries. This work will, in addition to anticipating consequences of physical conditions and anthropogenic land-use practices across Europe, aid in the development of new conservation strategies in response to environmental change, for example by identifying needs or opportunities to change the areas targeted for management actions such as habitat protection or restoration.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.