November 1, 2023

12:00pm, PST 1100 TLSB and Zoom

Morgan Tingley
UCLA, Dept of EEB

" Shifting climate, shifting species: changes to birds over space and time "

With accumulating evidence implicating climate change in animal population declines, increasing our understanding of the ways in which climate is impacting biodiversity is of critical need. While we have yet to lose only a handful of species to our rapidly changing global climate, animals are currently adapting and responding in myriad ways. Using a variety of long-term monitoring and citizen science datasets from across North America, this seminar describes how bird species are responding to climatic warming by changing their distributions, shifting their phenology, and even altering their morphology. While these three dimensions of climate change response have largely been studied independently, in many cases birds are shifting simultaneously in multiple ways – across space and time – a phenomenon that is likely complicating our ability to accurately predict future changes along only one dimension, such as space. Looking forward, ecologists will benefit from thinking of climate change across multiple dimensions of thermal gradients and taking a more holistic view of the potential and reality of climate change impacts.

Host: Nathan Kraft