Monitoring Climate Change with Community Science
Earth is getting hotter. Species that live along mountain slopes have the option of shifting their ranges to cooler high elevations. In some places, these upslope shifts have set in motion an “escalator to extinction” where species shift upslope until they eventually run out of room. However, we lack information on how the vast majority of bird species across the globe are (or are not) changing the elevations where they live. In fact, we don’t have a great understanding of which elevations birds live at right now.
Here’s where you come into the picture. Summer is a great time to get out into the mountains to enjoy the songs and bright colors of North American breeding birds. Spending an early morning going birding is a delight, and even better when you are contributing to a birder-led effort to understand how climate change might affect our local birdlife.
- Go birding at a designated Mountain Bird Network site this summer.
- Count the birds you see and hear
- Submit your counts to eBird & share your checklist with MountainBirdNetwork
For 2021, we're piloting Mountain Bird Network at four sites: Mt. Seymour, British Columbia; Deception Peak (a.k.a. Ski Santa Fe), New Mexico; the Sandia Mountains, New Mexico; and Mt. Hood, Oregon. We're hoping to expand in the coming years, but in the meantime, we're looking for birders in BC, NM, and OR to come and help!
Between sunrise and 10am on any day without rain between June 1 and July 15 - this is the breeding season, and we are interested in documenting breeding season distributions. Even one morning would provide great data (while being a fun excuse to get out into the woods), and the more days you go, the better!
Stand in one place for five minutes and record all birds that you see or hear within 50 meters of where you are standing. Voila - you’ve completed a point count! Now do the same thing again: keep standing in the same place for another five minutes, and complete a second point count (in a second checklist) at the exact same location. Enter these point counts into eBird on your smartphone using the free app. Then continue your walk/hike/drive, and do more point counts. Note that all point count sites that you do must be at least 150 m apart from one another, to ensure that each of your point counts samples the birds of a distinct location. Then later share your eBird checklists with MountainBirdNetwork, the eBird account that we have created to manage this project.
Point counts provide exceptionally fine-scale data for where birds actually live, and are tremendously useful for statistically modeling where birds live. Doing two point counts back-to-back provides the replication necessary to estimate detectability, which is necessary to statistically model a bird’s abundance at a particular site. The basic idea of detectability is that a bird might be present but you may not see it if it is hiding and quiet. The more point counts you do at a particular site, the better we will be able to model their detectability, and hence to model the true abundance.
Mt. Seymour, Deception Peak, the Sandias, and Mt. Hood are all easily accessible and fairly tall mountains near major metro areas, with great birds at all elevational zones. By thoroughly documenting bird’s abundances along these elevational gradients in 2021, we will create a fantastic baseline dataset that will be used to monitor future changes. If all goes well, we plan to expand this effort to include many more mountains across the globe in subsequent years.
We will use the data from all observers to model species’ abundances along all three elevational gradients, and will share these results with all participants. The goal is to write and publish a scientific manuscript using this data to show how a community-led effort can effectively monitor species’ distributions along mountain slopes. These publications and communications will not disclose the identity of observers.
For general questions, please contact project leader Ben Freeman, a postdoctoral researcher at University of British Columbia (freeman@zoology.ubc.ca). For New Mexico-specific questions, contact chapter leader Ethan Linck (ethanblinck@gmail.com), a postdoctoral researcher at University of New Mexico. For Oregon-specific questions, contract Matt Chmielewski (mwchmielewski@gmail.com), a postdoctoral researcher at Temple University.