The study seeks to provide a retrospective analysis of the relationships among bird abundance and distribution and changes in land cover and climate in the upper Midwest and Great Lakes region. The resultant models will be used to provide spatially explicit forecasts of future avian responses. Using data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) and a hierarchical modeling framework that accounts for imperfect detection during surveys, species distribution and abundance is estimated. Historic aerial photos are being digitized and classified to measure landscape covariates. Once species-specific relationships between distribution parameters (i.e., occupancy, colonization, extinction) and landscape covariates have been established, climate change projections will allow prediction of future species’ distributions.
