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Replication data for: Demographic declines and responses of breeding bird populations to human footprint in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region, Alberta, Canada

Cite this dataset

Saracco, James et al. (2022). Replication data for: Demographic declines and responses of breeding bird populations to human footprint in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region, Alberta, Canada [Dataset]. Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.j0zpc86hp

Abstract

This data package includes data files and an R script to reproduce results reported in the paper "Demographic declines and responses of breeding bird populations to human footprint in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region, Alberta, Canada". Analyses include hierarchical multispecies models applied to data from 31 bird species at 38 Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) stations to assess 10-year (2011–2020) demographic trends and responses to energy sector disturbance (human footprint proportion) in the Athabasca oil sands region of Alberta, Canada. Adult captures, productivity, and residency probability all declined over the study period, and adult apparent survival probability also tended to decline. Trends in adult captures, productivity, and survival were all more negative at stations with larger increases in disturbance over the study period. Species associated with early seral stages were more commonly captured at more disturbed stations, while species typical of mature forests were more commonly captured at less disturbed stations. Productivity was positively correlated with disturbance within 5 km of stations after controlling for disturbance within 1 km of stations. Adult apparent survival showed relatively little response to disturbance; stresses experienced beyond the breeding grounds likely play a larger role in influencing survival. Residency probability was negatively related to disturbance within 1-km scale of stations and could reflect processes affecting the ability of birds to establish or maintain territories in disturbed landscapes.

Methods

Avian capture and recapture data were collected for 31 species at 38 bird-banding stations in the Athabasca oil sands region of Alberta, Canada following protocols of the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) program (see https://birdpop.org/docs/misc/MAPSManual22.pdf for detail). Capture data for models indexing the abundance of adult birds (numbers of adult birds captured) and productivity (probability of a captured bird being a juvenile bird) were summarized by banding station and year for the years 2011–2020. Individual stations were operated from 2 to 10 years. Capture-recapture data for adults were summarized in an individual × year matrix with station identifiers and indicator variable denoting whether a bird was captured at least twice > 6 d apart in the year it was banded; capture-recapture data were only included for 35 stations operated in > 4 years. Also included are human footprint proportion data (https://www.abmi.ca/home/data-analytics/da-top/da-product-overview/Human-Footprint-Products/HF-inventory.html) summarized at 1-km (2018) and 5-km radius (2010 and 2018) buffers around banding station centers (proportions for individual disturbance classes also available for the 2018 data) and tree cover data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Vegetation Continuous Fields data product (MOD44B; DiMiceli et al. 2015) at 0.25-km pixel resolution for each station and averaged across captures for each bird species. 

Usage notes

R (https://www.R-project.org/; version 4.1.1 used for the analysis) and associated required packages are needed to read data files and run analyses included in the script. JAGS (https://mcmc-jags.sourceforge.io/) is needed to run Bayesian models. 

Funding

Syncrude (Canada)

Hammerstone Infrastructure Materials Limited

Canadian Natural Resources

Cenovus Energy (Canada)

ConocoPhillips (Canada)

Devon Energy (United States)

Husky Oil Operations Limited

Imperial Oil (Canada)

Suncor Energy (Canada)

TOTAL E&P Canada

CNOOC International

Oil Sands Developers Group

Oil Sands Monitoring Program