Final Report: Understanding the Links between Climate and Waterbirds across North America
Citation
Mark W. Miller, Mark S. Lindberg, James D Nichols, and David Verbyla, Final Report: Understanding the Links between Climate and Waterbirds across North America: .
Summary
The global mean surface temperature increased 0.85°C during the period 1880 – 2012. Some climate models predict an additional warming of up 2 to 4 ◦ C over the next 100 years for the primary breeding grounds for North American ducks. Such an increase has been predicted to reduce mid - continent breeding duck populations by >70%. Managing continental duck populations in the face of climate change requires understanding how waterfowl have responded to historical spatio - temporal climatic variation. However, such responses to climate may be obscured by how ducks respond to variation in land cover. We estimated effects of climate on settlement patterns of breeding ducks in the Prairie - Parkland Region (PPR), boreal forest, and tundra [...]
Summary
The global mean surface temperature increased 0.85°C during the period 1880 – 2012. Some climate models predict an additional warming of up 2 to 4 ◦ C over the next 100 years for the primary breeding grounds for North American ducks. Such an increase has been predicted to reduce mid - continent breeding duck populations by >70%. Managing continental duck populations in the face of climate change requires understanding how waterfowl have responded to historical spatio - temporal climatic variation. However, such responses to climate may be obscured by how ducks respond to variation in land cover. We estimated effects of climate on settlement patterns of breeding ducks in the Prairie - Parkland Region (PPR), boreal forest, and tundra accounting for potential confounding effects of variation in major land cover types. In the process, we address several hypotheses regarding how breeding ducks respond to environmental variation. Specifically, we modeled 1958 - 2012 species occupancy by relating Waterfowl Breeding Populatio n and Habitat Survey detection – non - detection data to annual winter temperature, winter precipitation, crop acreage, pond abundance and forest fires using multi - season occupancy models. We compare resulting estimated relationships between colonization and extinction and environmental covariates to predictions of our hypotheses.
Best models of annual extinction and colonization probabilities were almost invariably among the most complex in our model sets, suggesting all variables influenced duck settlement patterns across space and time. Climate and fire were important in the boreal forest. Climate, ponds, and cropland were important in the Canada PPR and Dakotas; climate variables were less important in Montana. Our results suggest that climatic warming could result in a shift of breeding duck distributions northward, reducing occupancy of breeding ducks in 3 the prairies and increasing occupancy of breeding ducks in the boreal forest. Models were difficult to construct for the tundra because of sparse data , although some models, together with naïve occupancy data, suggest several species have become more widespread in the Arctic over time. More extensive monitoring of waterfowl in the Arctic may be prudent. Temporal environmental change may need to be added to demographic models that underlie models of adaptive harvest management.
