A habitat-based approach to determining the effects of drought on aridland bird communities

Aridland breeding bird communities of the United States are among the most vulnerable to drought, with many species showing significant population declines associated with decreasing precipitation and increasing temperature. Individual breeding bird species have varied responses to drought which suggests complex responses to changes in water availability. Here, we evaluated the influence of water deficit, an integrative metric of drought stress, on breeding bird communities within three distinct aridland habitat types: riparian, pinyon-juniper, and sagebrush shrubland. We used 12 years of breeding bird survey data from 11 National Parks and Monuments in the Northern Colorado Plateau Inventory and Monitoring Network (NCPN). We used a multivariate community level approach to test for the effect of annual water deficit on the bird communities in the three habitats. We found that bird communities responded to water deficit in all three habitat types, and 70% of the 30 species-habitat combin...