Data and Code for "Drought Influences Habitat Associations and Abundances of Birds in California's Central Valley"
Data files
Mar 12, 2024 version files 25.96 KB
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all_CA_breeding_birds.csv
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ebird_protocol_codes.csv
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LandUseClassification_AcrossSites_FVEG_updated.csv
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README.md
Abstract
As climate change increases the frequency and severity of droughts in many regions, conservation during drought is becoming a major challenge for ecologists. Droughts are multidimensional climate events whose impacts may be moderated by changes in temperature, water availability, or food availability, or some combination of these. Simultaneously, other stressors such as extensive anthropogenic landscape modification may synergize with drought. Useful observational models for guiding conservation decision-making during drought require multidimensional, dynamic representations to disentangle possible drought impacts, and consequently they will require large, highly resolved data sets. In this paper, we develop a multi-model predictive framework for assessing how drought impacts vary with species, habitats, and climate pathways. We found that while fewer than a quarter (16/66) of species experienced abundance declines during drought, nearly half of all species (27/66) changed their habitat associations during drought. Among species that shifted their habitat associations, use of natural habitats declined during drought while use of developed habitat and perennial agricultural habitat increased. Our findings suggest that birds take advantage of agricultural and developed land with artificial irrigation and heat-buffering microhabitat structure, such as in orchards or parks, to buffer drought impacts. A working lands approach that promotes biodiversity and mitigates stressors across a human-induced water gradient will be critical for conserving birds during drought.
README: Data and Code for "Drought influences habitat associations and abundances of birds in California's Central Valley"
This project generated data files and conducted analyses reusing publicly available data sources, as attributed below.
For the eBird dataset, we queried all complete checklist observations of birds in California, USA, from 2010 to 2019.
- eBird. 2021. Citation: eBird: An online database of bird distribution and abundance [web application]. eBird, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Available: http://www.ebird.org. (Accessed: August 1, 2020).
Additionally, we used several other data inputs from publicly available repositories for the analysis:
- Functional Vegetation from LANDFIRE. Citation: LANDFIRE. (2020). LANDFIRE Remap 2016 Existing Vegetation Type (EVT) CONUS. Earth Resources Observation and Science Center (EROS), U.S. Geological Survey. http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/2d4c9eb438401e25f0de539924afcae2
- SPEI from SPEIbase. Citation: Beguería, S. (2022). sbegueria/SPEIbase: Version 2.7 (v2.7) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5864391
- EVI from MODIS. Citation: Vermote, E., & Wolfe, R. (2023). MOD09GA MODIS/Terra Surface Reflectance Daily L2G Global 1kmand 500m SIN Grid V006 [Data set] 2015. https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD09GA.006
- NDWI from Landsat. Citation: USGS. (2022). USGS Landsat 7 Collection 1 Tier 1 and Real-Time data Raw Scenes [Data set]. https://www.usgs.gov/landsat-missions/landsat-collection-1
Temperature and precipitation from PRISM. Citation: Hart, E. M., & Bell, K. (2015). prism: Download data from the Oregon prism project. https://github.com/ropensci/prism
Refer to the README accompanying the code and the GitHub repository for more information about the requirements for reproducing the findings reported in the associated manuscript.
Methods
We used a multi-model counterfactual analysis combining predictive linear mixed models and N-mixture models to characterize the multidimensional impacts of drought on 66 bird species. We analyzed counts from the eBird participatory science dataset between 2010 and 2019 and produced species, as well as habitat-specific estimates of the impact of drought on relative abundance.
Usage notes