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Modeling Avian Responses to Climate Change
The kinds of birds that you may see at your bird feeder are changing. As people burn fossil fuels and increase the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is causing our climate to warm and patterns of rainfall are changing. Different bird species can live in different climate conditions. If the conditions change an a species can't live in a place anymore its distribution will shift. We use an excellent resource representing the efforts of thousands of volunteers over a 45 year period, the Breeding Bird Survey, to represent the distribution of birds in the continental United States. A statistical method of predicting the relative abundance of the birds called regression tree analysis, is used. Finally, we're using a new approach to model the interactions of birds and how the kinds of places they occupy may change in subtle ways over time to predict how birds will respond to a changing climate.
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