Bird distribution and diversity following climate change

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 BIRDCHANGE (Exploring bird distribution drivers across different spatial scales and time to predict the potential impact of global change on bird distributions and diversity) project used decades of data on the distribution of American birds to validate such models.

Researchers identified the best climate predictors for SDMs and applied their findings to global distribution models. They used data for 243 species going back to 1971 to test how useful various climate predictors were for producing accurate SDMs. They discovered that 3 temperature-related predictors and one rainfall linked provided the most accurate models.

The final results will demonstrate how biodiversity (including species richness, functional diversity and phylogenetic diversity) is for birds are expected to change in the face of climate change. The findings will be of great value for policymakers and help raise awareness of climate change and its potential causes among the general public.

BIRDCHANGE highlighted the importance of finding the best climatic drivers of bird distribution. It then predicted the potential impacts of climatic change and raised the potential issue of model transferability, a key assumption for most of the climate change predictions.