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Organized Oral Session

Session: An individual eye on a global problem: Unique insights from animal tracking on biodiversity responses to climatic change

OOS 11-3 - CANCELLED - Integrating migratory bird tracking data for full annual cycle, multi-species conservation prioritizations in the Western Hemisphere

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

10:30 AM – 10:45 AM EDT

Location: 520E

Presenting Author(s)

JD

Jill Deppe

Senior Director Migratory Bird Initiative
National Audubon Society, United States

Co-author(s)

JD

Jill Deppe

Senior Director Migratory Bird Initiative
National Audubon Society, United States
TM

Tim Meehan

Quantitative Ecologist
National Audubon Society
BB

Brooke Bateman

Director Climate Science
National Audubon Society
WD

William DeLuca

Migration Ecologist
National Audubon Society
JG

Joanna Grand

Senior Spatial Ecologist
National Audubon Society
EK

Erika Knight

GIS/Data Analyst
National Audubon Society
NM

Nicole L. Michel

Director Quantitative Science
National Audubon Society, New York City, NY, USA, United States
SS

Sarah Saunders

Quantitative Ecologist
National Audubon Society, United States
NS

Nat Seavy

Director Migration Science
National Audubon Society
MS

Melanie Smith

Program Manager Bird Migration Explorer
National Audubon Society
LT

Lotem Taylor

GIS/Data Analyst
National Audubon Society
JV

Jorge Velsquez-Tibata

Science Director Audubon Americas
National Audubon Society
CW

Chad Witko

Outreach Biologist
National Audubon Society
CW

Chad Wilsey

VP & Chief Scientist
National Audubon Society

Background/Question/Methods
Since 1970, North America has lost 2.5 billion migratory birds and global temperatures have risen by 0.68 degrees C, threatening up to 2/3 of North American bird species with extinction. During this time period, we have developed new technologies for tracking long-distance migratory species, which have revealed connections among the different seasons of the annual cycle and spatial movements across the Western Hemisphere.

The future of migratory birds depends on the timely use of this information to develop evidence-based hemispheric conservation strategies. However, broad-scale spatial prioritizations for migratory bird conservation planning have not included individual-based tracking and connectivity data, which can provide unique information to identify important places, pressing threats, and effective conservation solutions. We describe a spatially-explicit approach for integrating tracking, connectivity and occurrence data which is then used as the basis for a multi-species, full annual cycle, spatial prioritization process to identify areas of high conservation value across the Western Hemisphere.

As part of a separate effort, we identified climate strongholds through a complementarity-based optimization approach that incorporated current and future predicted species distributions, habitat availability, and quality. To achieve maximum conservation impact, we compared our prioritization outputs with climate stronghold maps.

Results/Conclusions
By integrating bird banding, tracking, and occurrence data, we predicted and mapped migration pathways and non-migratory distributions for individual species to explicitly incorporate migration into hemispheric spatial prioritizations. We identified areas of high conservation value for migratory birds across their full annual cycle by combining maps across multiple species. These types of integrated movement models can incorporate behavioral mechanisms into hemispheric distributional patterns for individual or multiple species. By overlaying our full annual cycle prioritizations with climate strongholds, we identified places that offer no-regret opportunities to address migratory bird conservation and climate vulnerability.