Final Report: Forecasting resource availability for wildlife populations in desert grasslands under future climate extremes

The potential responses of animal species to climate change often are assessed by correlating species occurrence or density with long-term average temperature or precipitation. These approaches overlook the effects on species’ distributions and abundances of climate extremes and the indirect effects of climate. We developed an approach for projecting responses of wildlife to future climate that explicitly accounted for the direct effects of climate extremes and the indirect effects of climate via changes in the timing and magnitude of primary productivity (henceforth phenology). We used historical climate data and remotely sensed data on phenology to develop predictive models of climate-phenology relations in desert...

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