weather, not climate, defines distributions of vagile bird species天气,气候,定义了分布的漫游的鸟类.pdfVIP

Weather, Not Climate, Defines Distributions of Vagile Bird Species 1,2 2 1 1 April E. Reside *, Jeremy J. VanDerWal , Alex S. Kutt , Genevieve C. Perkins 1 Climate Adaptation Flagship and Ecosystem Sciences, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Townsville, Queensland, Australia, 2 Centre for Tropical Biodiversity and Climate Change, School of Marine and Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia Abstract Background: Accurate predictions of species distributions are essential for climate change impact assessments. However the standard practice of using long-term climate averages to train species distribution models might mute important temporal patterns of species distribution. The benefit of using temporally explicit weather and distribution data has not been assessed. We hypothesized that short-term weather associated with the time a species was recorded should be superior to long-term climate measures for predicting distributions of mobile species. Methodology: We tested our hypothesis by generating distribution models for 157 bird species found in Australian tropical savannas (ATS) using modelling algorithm Maxent. The variable weather of the ATS supports a bird assemblage with variable movement patterns and a high incidence of nomadism. We developed ‘‘weather’’ models by relating climatic variables (mean temperature, rainfall, rainfall seasonality and temperature seasonality) from the three month, six month and one year period preceding each bird record over a 58 year period (1950–2008). These weather models were compared against models built using long-term (30 year) averages of the same climatic variables. Conclusion